College Football Playoff Set, SEC Well Represented With Alabama and Georgia
The College Football Playoff is set as Alabama, Michigan, Georgia and Cincinnati will be the four programs competing for a national championship.
The No. 1 seeded Crimson Tide will take on the No. 4 seeded Bearcats while the No. 2 seeded Wolverines and No. 3 seeded Bulldogs will square off on Dec. 31. Because it is the No. 1 seed, Alabama gets to choose which bowl it will be playing in, either the Cotton Bowl in Dallas or the Orange Bowl in Miami Gardens, Florida.
Nick Saban and company entered Saturday's SEC Championship game as emphatic underdogs to the undefeated Bulldogs. The SEC title broke a string of 92 straight games in which Alabama was favored heading into the matchup and pulled off a 41-24 win to secure a spot in the playoff.
Saban talked about the "rat poison" that was relayed from the media to the Alabama team over the last week and how the players used it as motivation against Georgia.
"I think what these guys really wanted to gain was more respect," Saban said. "Not just the fact that they were underdogs, because I think we had a tremendous amount of respect for Georgia, their team and what they accomplished. But you guys gave us a lot of really positive rat poison. The rat poison that you usually give us is usually fatal, but the rat poison that you put out there this week was yummy."
Dating back to the beginning of the College Football Playoff in 2014-15, the SEC has had at least one team represented in every season, with this being the second time two teams from the SEC being selected for the playoff. Alabama has been in the playoff every year except once, back in 2019 when LSU won the national championship.
Now that the playoff and final rankings have been announced, other bowl game announcements should start to be released throughout the day. LSU is most likely projected to either the Texas Bowl or the Birmingham Bowl so the Tigers will be staying close to home regardless.
