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Texas QB, Arch Manning, Tennessee QB Faizon Brandon, Ole Miss QB Trinidad Chambliss, and Florida QB next to SEC logo
September college football schedules are usually where contenders spend a few weeks beating somebody from the Sun Belt by 38 points before the serious stuff starts. The SEC apparently decided to skip that portion of the program and schedule what looks like a miniature playoff round for Saturday.
Four conference games will feature ranked teams facing ranked teams, something no league has ever produced on a single day in the history of the AP Top 25. CBS Sports notes the SEC enters Week 4 with 10 ranked teams and will send eight of them directly at each other.
The SEC Basically Scheduled An Elimination Round In September
The slate starts immediately.
No. 1 Texas travels to No. 14 Tennessee at noon in the first meeting between the programs since the 1969 Cotton Bowl. Then No. 4 Ole Miss heads to Gainesville to face No. 21 Florida at 3:30 p.m. At night, No. 23 Texas A&M visits No. 10 LSU at 7:30, followed 15 minutes later by No. 19 Missouri at No. 24 Mississippi State.
That means there is essentially no point Saturday when the SEC is not putting two ranked teams into a confined space and asking them to ruin each other’s season.
The latest AP poll has Texas, Georgia, Ole Miss, Alabama, and LSU all sitting inside the top 10, with Tennessee, Missouri, Florida, Texas A&M, and Mississippi State giving the league 10 ranked teams overall.
Only two of them get the weekend off from beating each other. Georgia hosts Oklahoma, which fell out of the poll Sunday, while Alabama is idle.
Everyone else apparently drew a knife.
College Football Has Six Ranked Matchups On Saturday
The SEC somehow does not even have a monopoly on the chaos.
No. 17 Iowa travels to No. 18 Michigan, while No. 20 Oregon faces No. 12 USC, giving the country six ranked-vs.-ranked games on the same Saturday.
The four SEC games are still the record-setting part. No single conference has ever produced that many AP-ranked matchups on one day. It also creates some genuinely weird early-season stakes.
Texas can collect another major road win after already beating Ohio State. Tennessee gets a chance to completely change its national perception. Ole Miss can reinforce its jump to No. 4 after beating LSU, while Florida can follow an upset at Auburn by taking down another top-five opponent.
LSU and Texas A&M are both trying to recover from losses before September turns into a two-loss hole.
Missouri and Mississippi State get perhaps the strangest matchup of the bunch: two ranked teams who entered the season nowhere near the center of the national-title conversation suddenly playing what feels like a postseason résumé game.
The expanded College Football Playoff means one loss no longer destroys a season, but losing conference games still makes everything considerably more annoying when November arrives.