Conference Races

Every league

The favorite in each, and how often the last berth in the title game is level on conference percentage — which is to say, how often a tiebreaker decides who plays for the trophy rather than the standings deciding it outright.

SEC standings, projected

Title game and title are different questions, and the gap between them is how often a team is expected to get there and lose. The projected conference record is the mean across all 50,000 seasons, so it carries fractions a real record cannot.

The title games it stages most often

Every pairing the simulation produced, most common first. A championship game is two teams surviving twelve weeks apiece, so even the likeliest is a small number — the shape of this list says more than its top row.

• Georgia vs LSU12%
• Georgia vs Texas9.2%
• LSU vs Texas6.3%
• Georgia vs Texas A&M4.5%
• Alabama vs Texas3.7%
• LSU vs Oklahoma3.6%

Since preseason

The SEC’s best title odds, week by week, on a shared 0–100% scale. Earlier weeks are replayed with the current model rather than recorded at the time, so they say what today’s simulation makes of that week.

22%Georgia−5.821%LSU+10.418%Texas+5.78.0%Texas A&M−2.67.3%Alabama+0.75.3%Oklahoma−1.1

Who moved

Change in title probability from preseason to week 1. A league is zero-sum — every point one team gains came off the rest of them.

• LSU11% → 21%+10.4
• Texas12% → 18%+5.7
• Florida3.8% → 5.3%+1.6
• Alabama6.6% → 7.3%+0.7
• Vanderbilt1.5% → 0.9%-0.7
• Oklahoma6.4% → 5.3%-1.1
• Auburn1.8% → 0.5%-1.3
• Missouri4.2% → 2.5%-1.7
• Tennessee6.7% → 4.2%-2.5
• Texas A&M11% → 8.0%-2.6
• Ole Miss4.7% → 2.0%-2.7
• Georgia27% → 22%-5.8

What a conference loss costs

How often each team still wins the SEC having lost exactly that many league games. Affords is the most it can take and stay better than even — blank for a team that is not better than even unbeaten.

Share of simulated seasons a team makes the field, given it finishes with exactly that many losses. ⚠ These are raw conditionals: a team that reaches 9–3 against a brutal schedule is a better team than one that reaches 9–3 against an easy one, and some of the spread below is that rather than the committee rewarding a résumé.

Team	0L	1L	2L	3L	4L	5L	6L	7L	8L	9L	Affords
Georgia	61	45	15	1	0	0	0	0	0	—	0
LSU	60	46	16	1	0	0	0	0	—	—	0
Texas	65	46	12	0	0	0	0	0	—	—	0
Texas A&M	57	43	14	1	0	0	0	0	0	—	0
Alabama	53	39	11	0	0	0	0	0	0	—	0
Oklahoma	54	38	8	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Florida	51	35	9	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Tennessee	51	33	9	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
South Carolina	44	31	8	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	—
Missouri	51	34	7	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Ole Miss	47	34	10	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	—
Vanderbilt	38	22	4	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	—

What decides it

The remaining league games ranked by how much the title race is reshaped depending on who wins — measured across every team’s odds at once, not just the favorite’s. Early in a season the front-runner’s own schedule dominates this list, which is not a quirk of the method: it is what a one-team league looks like in September.

• wk11Texas at LSUmoves Texas25.4
• wk6Georgia at Alabamamoves Georgia23.1
• wk9Florida at Georgiamoves Georgia21.8
• wk4Oklahoma at Georgiamoves Georgia21.5
• wk4Texas A&M at LSUmoves LSU21.0
• wk12Georgia at South Carolinamoves Georgia21.0
• wk10Alabama at LSUmoves LSU20.5
• wk13Texas at Texas A&Mmoves Texas20.4