2024 SEC Championship Game: Chaos scenarios and tiebreakers await in college football

There are three Saturdays remaining in the college football regular season, which means the SEC Championship Game is in less than a month – the first one in over 30 years to be determined without divisions.

As part of conference realignment this season, the SEC did away with the East and West divisions that split the conference since the early 1990s. The winner of the East division has played the winner of the West division in the conference championship since then.

Without divisions and with new teams in the conference, the potential for chaos is higher than ever, which means there are a lot of potential tiebreaking scenarios that would determine which teams go to the SEC Championship game. And remember, the winner of that game will earn an automatic spot in the College Football Playoff.

Read on for more on the SEC title and tiebreaking scenarios.

When is the SEC Championship Game?

The SEC Championship Game will be Saturday, December 7, 2024. It will be held at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta at 4pm Eastern.

Who will play in the SEC Championship Game?

Without divisions, the top two teams in the SEC standings will make it to the conference title game. Conference standings are determined by in-conference results only. Complete season records are not relevant. So a team with multiple out-of-conference losses could still be at the top of the table within the conference.

Who are the favorites to make it to the SEC Championship Game?

Entering Week 12, there are three teams in the SEC with only one in-conference loss; every other team has at least two. Texas, Tennessee, and Texas A&M are tied at the top of the SEC standings with three games to play.

Texas and Texas A&M will face each other in the final week of the regular season – if they both still have only one conference loss at that time, the winner of the game will make it to the title game. (There is even a scenario where they both could go to the title game, regardless of who wins.)

Tennessee’s remaining opponents are Georgia, UTEP, and Vanderbilt – if the Volunteers win out, they will make it to the SEC title game.

That’s the biggest “if” in the SEC right now, as Tennessee has to travel to Athens to play the Dawgs on the road at night and, depending on the book you use, Georgia is about a 10-point favorite.

If the Volunteers lose to Georgia this week, they’ll join the five other teams in the SEC with two conference losses, setting off a possibly chaotic chain of events to determine the top teams in the conference at the end of the season.

What are the SEC tiebreaking procedures?

In the event that two of the three one-loss teams don’t win out (Tennessee, Texas, Texas A&M), the SEC will almost certainly need to use tiebreakers to determine which teams make it to Atlanta.

The SEC says: “In the event of a tie between teams competing for a place in the Conference championship game, the following procedures will be used in descending order until the tie is broken:

A. Head-to-head competition among the tied teams
B. Record versus all common Conference opponents among the tied teams
C. Record against highest (best) placed common Conference opponent in the Conference standings, and proceeding through the Conference standings among the tied teams
D. Cumulative Conference winning percentage of all Conference opponents among the tied teams
E. Capped relative total scoring margin versus all Conference opponents among the tied teams
F. Random draw of the tied teams”

Easy enough, but the real complication comes when one applies these procedures to a tie involving three or more teams.

What are the possible SEC Championship scenarios?

The Simplest One

The simplest scenario is the one laid out above – that Tennessee wins out, and either Texas or Texas A&M does the same. In that case, the winner of Texas-Texas A&M at the end of the season would play Tennessee in Atlanta.

The Craziest One

But if Tennessee loses to Georgia this weekend, or either of the other teams suffers an unexpected upset, there could be as many as eight teams with 2 conference losses, all tied at the top of the conference. Consider that Tennessee may get its second loss to Georgia; Texas could get its second loss in an upset at Arkansas; and Texas A&M could take a second loss against Texas. How do you apply tiebreaking procedures to eight teams?

In this scenario, which would include Texas, Texas A&M, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Ole Miss, LSU, and Mizzou, the likely determining tiebreaker is the fourth one on the list – cumulative conference winning percentage of all conference opponents (put simply: strength of schedule). The eight teams don’t all play each other head-to-head and they don’t all have even one common opponent.

In the strength-of-schedule tiebreaker, beware to teams who played winless Mississippi State, because the win percentage of your opponents is going to drop quickly. And that would lead to a conference championship between Alabama and LSU, the only teams in the hypothetical 8-way tie without Mississippi State on their schedule.

The Likely One

If you subscribe to oddsmakers’ wisdom, then you expect Tennessee to lose to Georgia and you expect Mizzou to lose to South Carolina this weekend, and you expect everything else to stay status quo through the remainder of the regular season.

The scenario that likely leads to is a single one-loss team at the top of the SEC table: the winner of Texas at Texas A&M on November 30. So the winner of that game would earn their ticket to the title game, and there would be six other teams (loser of that game plus Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Ole Miss, LSU) with two conference losses, all tied for second place.

Again, these teams do not all play each other (regardless of which Texas school is part of the scenario), and they do not all have a common opponent. So in a comparison of conference opponents’ winning percentages, teams again have the problem of Mississippi State. Georgia would be eliminated almost immediately by this tiebreaker, by virtue of playing not only Mississippi State, but also one-win teams Kentucky and Auburn. Ole Miss and Tennessee suffer the same fate by each playing Oklahoma, Kentucky and Mississippi State. So that leaves us to compare a Texas team with LSU and Alabama.

Once we eliminate Georgia, Ole Miss, and Tennessee, here are the remaining scenarios, assuming no major upsets (but there is one consequential one we’ll account for here – Arkansas at Missouri in the final week of the season):

• Texas beats Texas A&M, Arkansas beats Mizzou: Texas and Texas A&M advance to the SEC Championship game

• Texas beats Texas A&M, Mizzou beats Arkansas: Texas and Alabama advance to the SEC Championship game

• Texas A&M beats Texas, Arkansas beats Mizzou: Texas A&M and LSU advance to the SEC Championship game

• Texas A&M beats Texas, Mizzou beats Arkansas: Texas A&M and Alabama advance to the SEC Championship game

When will we know who is going to the SEC Championship game?

Barring super surprising upsets outside of what’s been laid out here, we won’t know who’s going to the SEC title game until the final SEC game is played on November 30.