SEC bowl projections after Week 9

The weirdest football season in memory keeps getting weirder.

Among the unbeaten teams in late November are Northwestern, Marshall, BYU, Buffalo, Kent State, San Jose State and Coastal Carolina.

We all saw that coming, right?

So it is that this is a weird bowl season. There is no wins requirement for 2020, but there have to be some standards, or at least one would hope. So do we. We no longer see Tennessee as a viable bowl option. We kept waiting for the Vols to wake up, but nope. We think Tennessee will finish 3-7 with a season-ending 1-6 stretch. Even in a year where teams don’t have to have a certain number of wins, we do think 3-7 teams won’t have high priority, regardless of brand name.

Georgia needs to be on the defensive, too. In a normal year, an 8-2 Bulldogs team would be a lock for a New Year’s Day 6 bowl. We still have them up there … for now. But with the possibility of two Group of 5 teams (Cincinnati and BYU) going to major bowls, the likelihood of three ACC teams making it and the likelihood of UGA being the SEC’s 4th choice … it’s iffy. Especially after a performance like Saturday’s, when Georgia barely beat a visiting Mississippi State team that literally did not have enough scholarship players to play but decided to go forward with the game anyway.

Now let’s look at this week’s projections:

Jim Tomlin

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