… it’s time to focus in more specifically on SEC bowl projections, and the team that lived through the most fluctuation–both in their own game, and with their fortunes in the Auburn-Georgia game–was the South Carolina Gamecocks.
The last Saturday in October is upon us, the first official BCS rankings were released later in the week and that means the race for conference championships and bowl bids is in full swing. TheSportsNotebook’s college football coverage is breaking down the week with a separate post for each conference. Our focus here is the SEC.
Let’s take a look at the hows and whys of “Black Saturday” in the SEC and then discuss what the long-term implications are in both the national and conference picture.
Let’s take a brief look at the landscape in the nation’s top conference and then make some SEC bowl projections…
There’s an East-West combo on the ESPN family of networks at 7 PM ET.
TheSportsNotebook.com’s college football coverage has updated its BCS bowl projections following Week 4, with a special look at the chances of Fresno State rising out of the Mountain West. Here’s a look at the SEC…
College football’s top rung is currently held down by Alabama and will be until they lose outright, rather than just look sluggish. That’ s appropriate for a program that has won three of the last four national championships, but there’s also no denying that the Tide looked like a team with a lot of work to do in their 35-10 win over Virginia Tech.
The SEC’s dominance of college football goes well beyond the fact they’ve owned the BCS National Championship since 2006, including Alabama’s thrashing of Notre Dame in the 2012 national title game down in Miami. When it comes to measuring conference strength, it’s far more important to look further down the ladder, and it’s here that SEC dominance has really stood out.
The three-team fight for supremacy in the SEC East should be as entertaining a race as any in college football this year. You can make a good argument for any of Georgia, Florida or South Carolina to win the division. You can make a good argument that any of the three could beat Alabama in the SEC Championship Game on December 7, and from there, the recent history of this conference tells you that it’s likely any of the three could move on and play for a national championship.
The question that overrides all preseason college football coverage starts in the SEC West, and it’s simply whether or not anyone can stop Alabama. Not beat them—we’ve seen the Tide lose games on their national title runs, to LSU in 2011 and to Texas A&M last season. But it’s ultimately been enough—whether by generous voters in ’11 or legitimately winning the SEC West in ’12—to get ‘Bama into the BCS National Championship Game.