As the 2024 college football season nears, officials with the SEC have announced new tie-breaking procedures for the conference’s championship game.
The move comes as the conference has abandoned the east and west divisions for the first time since 1991 after officially welcoming Texas and Oklahoma as its newest members.
In the event of a tie between teams competing for a place in the SEC championship game, the following procedures will be used in descending order until the tie is broken:
- Head-to-head competition among the tied teams
- Record versus all common Conference opponents among the tied teams
- Record against the highest (best) placed common Conference opponent in the Conference standings, and proceeding through the Conference standings among the tied teams
- Cumulative Conference winning percentage of all Conference opponents among the tied teams
- Capped relative total scoring margin versus all Conference opponents among the tied teams
- A random draw of the tied teams
If the regular season standings determine a clear conference champion and two or more teams are tied for second place, the SEC champion will be the home team in the title game and the tiebreaking procedures will be used to determine its opponent.
If a tiebreaker step produces standings with two teams tied for first place in the SEC, both will qualify for the championship game. To decide the seeding of the two teams, both will progress through the two-team tiebreaker procedures until the tie is broken, which will determine home/away designation for the SEC championship.
The 2024 SEC Championship Game is scheduled to take place on Saturday, December 7 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. Winning the SEC championship would automatically place a program into the inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff. In the expanded Playoff model, the five highest-ranked conference champions and the next seven highest-ranked teams will earn a spot in the bracket.
Ranked No. 6 in the preseason Associated Press poll, Ole Miss will look to capitalize on the new landscape of the sport and make the program’s first-ever playoff appearance. The Rebels ended the 2023 campaign with an 11-2 record and would have had the chance to compete for a title if the 12-team bracket were intact.
While Mississippi State and Southern Miss will push for a bowl game appearance after missing the postseason one year ago, neither program is expected to make a College Football Playoff debut.
