2021 SEC Bowl Projections entering Week 1

If there is any normalcy left in college football after an earth-shaking, COVID-19-affected 2020, it can be found in the SEC.

In a year where pretty much nobody played a normal 12-game slate and some Power 5 teams got in as few as 4 games, the SEC carved out a 10-game all-conference schedule. A grand total of 2 SEC games went unplayed in the regular season.

This is not a criticism of any conferences or any bowls or teams. All we’re saying is, in a year when nothing was anywhere near normal anywhere, the SEC was as close to normal as college football got in 2020.

The bowls were further evidence of that close-to-normal 2020 experience in the SEC.

There were 8 SEC teams in the postseason, in a year when only 26 bowls were played. Of those teams, 6 won their bowls.

And Alabama won 2, giving the Crimson Tide the national championship and putting coach Nick Saban back atop the college football world a year after LSU had bumped him off that perch.

That made it back-to-back years that an SEC team won the national championship with an undefeated season and a record-shattering offense.

Going into 2021, 12-game regular seasons and a full glut of bowls should return. Thus, we project 12 of the SEC’s 14 teams (sorry, South Carolina and Vanderbilt) to reach the postseason. And we are picking Alabama to return yet again to the 4-team College Football Playoff.

So here we go with the first set of projections for the 2021 season:

Jim Tomlin

Longtime newspaper veteran Jim Tomlin is a copy editor and writer with SaturdayDownSouth.com.