If the Longhorns win out, they will be in Atlanta next month playing for a conference title.
“I don’t know if you guys saw the tiebreaker rules for who gets into the SEC Championship game, but I did, and I stopped reading after about two pages worth.”
The joke from Texas Longhorns head coach Steve Sarkisian came before the team’s SEC opener against the Mississippi State Bulldogs in September, an indication of how far ahead Sarkisian was already looking thanks to the convoluted tiebreaker process the conference had to implement after adding the Longhorns and the Oklahoma Sooners this year, which necessitated a move away from divisions, significantly complicating the process.
“Once you lose one, now you leave yourself susceptible to, what if there’s a four-team tie in second place? So let’s try not to get into a tie,” Sarkisian said.
On the SEC website, the PDF document for the official conference tiebreakers is 22 pages long, but fortunately for Texas, the second conference loss by Georgia over the weekend helped negate the impact of the 30-15 win by the Bulldogs over the Longhorns last month in Austin.
Now Tennessee, Texas, and Texas A&M are the only one-loss teams in the conference. Since the Longhorns and Aggies reprise the Lone Star Showdown in College Station in 16 days, the selection process for the SEC Championship game will be simple if one team emerges from that game still at one defeat in conference — that team will be in Atlanta playing for the SEC title.
“We really can only control what we can control and we stubbed our toe a few weeks ago. Like I said, we’ve been in this position before where we feel like we go into every Saturday now from here on out like this is an SEC championship game, and we don’t want to leave it up to anybody else to win or lose to give us an opportunity to get into that game,” Sarkisian said on Monday.
“We can control it ourselves right now, and that’s a great place to be in, but we have to do it one game at a time and we have to view Saturday against Arkansas as if it’s a SEC championship game because, in reality, it is. If we want to get there, we’ve got to win Saturday.”
As Sarkisian alluded to, Texas has been in this position before — after the last-second loss to Oklahoma in the Cotton Bowl last year, the Horns needed some help to make it to the Big 12 Championship game in Arlington. The Sooners obliged, dropping consecutive games to the Jayhawks and Pokes to allow the Longhorns to finish the season atop the conference standings.
More importantly, though, as Sarkisian and his players intoned every week, each game was a championship game. The closer-than-expected road victory against Houston? A championship game. The overtime win over Kansas State? A championship game. The road game against TCU? A championship game.
The Longhorns persevered, even while playing without starting quarterback Quinn Ewers for the end of the win over the Cougars and the subsequent home game against the Wildcats, putting the team’s culture to the test and proving their ability to finish in tight contests.
Now the scenario looks the same — Saturday against Arkansas in Fayetteville is a championship game, as is the Kentucky game as the Wildcats travel to Austin. And then there’s the regular-season finale, another potential championship game if the Horns can win the next two contests.
How’s that for drama?