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SEC bowl projections after Week 7: Chaos creates opening for 2 SEC teams in Playoff
By Jim Tomlin
Published:
Well, that was an interesting weekend.
Seven ranked teams lost Friday or Saturday — all to unranked teams.
Call it college chaos. No. 2 Clemson, No. 5 Washington and No. 8 Washington State were among the teams seeing their hopes for an unbeaten season dashed.
In the SEC, of course, the big result was LSU’s comeback victory over No. 10 Auburn, which knocks the orange and blue Tigers down the pecking order and gives a boost to the purple and gold Tigers.
And the result raises the question: Will anyone in the SEC aside from Alabama and Georgia get to 10 wins this season? How about nine?
This isn’t going to make anyone happy but, for now, there are too many quality unbeaten and one-loss teams contending for the New Year’s Day 6, so the SEC now only gets two of those spots.
The league is just so balanced that, again, it’s hard to see anybody from the third-best team on down really breaking out of the pack. The best chance? Could still be Auburn. Or how about Texas A&M, which already got its loss to Alabama out of the way? We almost forgot about you, Aggies, after that opening debacle against UCLA (but that loss looks worse every week as Bruins coach Jim Mora keeps having to update his resume).
The good news for the SEC?
The weekend’s results made it somewhat harder for the ACC and way harder for the Pac-12 to earn a spot in the College Football Playoff. My thought from the beginning was that the Pac-12 was so balanced that its champion would have two losses. A week after I gave up that notion, the league finally gave it credence. Also, Auburn beating Georgia seems less likely now. So, any Georgia fans scrunching up their faces at these predictions on a weekly basis can sleep tight and unfurrow their brows. They’re all right, for now.
Longtime newspaper veteran Jim Tomlin is a copy editor and writer with SaturdayDownSouth.com.
