| Not so long ago — like, six weeks — Alabama and Georgia were the twin titans of the SEC, and everybody else in the conference was fighting for the bronze medal. Go ahead and Sharpie the Tide and the Dawgs into the College Football Playoff and sort out the other details later.
Funny the difference a nuclear-powered Volunteer offense can make. Tennessee has thundered into the SEC conversation, upending conventional wisdom along with Alabama. And suddenly, everything that looked so settled before the season kicked off now looks a whole lot more uncertain.
The stakes for Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee are simple: the winner of the SEC championship gets a ticket to the College Football Playoff, guaranteed. The second-place finisher in the SEC probably gets a nod, too. Third place is, you're fired. Or sent to a lower-tier bowl, whichever.
The question now is, who will meet in Atlanta to determine the SEC championship? Georgia and Tennessee will meet in Athens on Nov. 5 for the most important SEC East battle since, what, Peyton vs. Spurrier in the 1990s? Meanwhile, on the other side of the conference, Alabama isn’t even leading its own division right now, and a Nov. 11 matchup with undefeated Ole Miss in Oxford could have thermonuclear heat if everyone holds serve 'til then.
Even discarding the wildest possibilities, you don’t have to go too far down the realm of message-board speculation to arrive at this scenario: Alabama gets its act together after taking a Knoxville cigar to the face and wins out, reaching the SEC championship as the West’s representative. Georgia barely gets past Tennessee to take the East. In a rematch of last year's national championship game, Alabama beats Georgia and captures the SEC title.
That leaves you with three elite teams, each with a loss to one of the others, each with a win over one of the others. Who goes to the playoff, and who spends New Year’s seething? There’s potentially a path for two: Georgia made it into the playoff last season despite losing the SEC championship; Alabama reached the playoff — and won — in 2017 without reaching the SEC title game. But where do you draw that line? And fighting through some undefeated combination of Ohio State, Michigan, Clemson, and even TCU and UCLA, would be a tough ask.
Now, if you’re at all familiar with college football, you know this is the point in the season where these kinds of wild-ass possibilities start to take flight. It seems like there will be a total realigning of the planets … and then we end up with Alabama, Georgia, Clemson and Ohio State in the CFP. That’s the most likely outcome; the kings are the kings for a reason.
But then again, Alabama was a two-touchdown favorite over Tennessee at one point ... and we see how that turned out.
—Follow Jay Busbee on Twitter
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