New Year’s Day doesn’t bring an end to the college football season and settle a national champion the way it used to, but in terms of raw volume, January 1 still brings the biggest feast of the college bowl season. Four games will set the table in the early afternoon, with three Big Ten-SEC matchups.
There are nineteen games in the books for this college bowl season but none of them have involved the SEC. The nation’s most highly regarded conference now swings into action, with teams in five of the eight games that will take place from New Year’s Eve on Monday through the first part of New Year’s Day on Tuesday. Three of those involve SEC teams currently ranked in the Top 10 and likely playing to stay there.
It’s those games—involving South Carolina, Georgia and LSU that will lead our preview of what we’ll dramatically call the New Year’s Octave, the sequence of eight games that starts at noon ET on Monday and leads up to the Rose Bowl at 5 PM ET on Tuesday.