ESPN’s Josh Pate on How Many SEC Teams Could Make the College Football Playoff

The SEC's top eight teams all play each other this weekend. To ESPN's Josh Pate, "it's almost like it was written that way."

Rich laid out the slate: Alabama at LSU, Texas at Missouri, Georgia at Ole Miss and Kentucky at Tennessee. He also couldn't resist a note on Alabama visiting LSU and Lane Kiffin. "This is what? Two angry fan bases ago?" Rich joked about how much water is under that bridge.

Pate picked Alabama-LSU as the one to highlight, while acknowledging the depth of the day. "It's the kind of day where probably the fourth biggest game would be highlight material," he said. Texas-Missouri might have been the biggest game in the country if it had been played last week, and they could get through the whole conversation without touching it.

The last time Pate saw Alabama on the road, at Neyland, the Tide were "a mess, totally discombobulated." Both teams are banged up. Alabama has been badly banged up, Pate said, and he had been talking with someone down there just 20 minutes earlier about the prospects of getting their center and Ryan Williams back, plus a number of defensive players. "This is the kind of all hands on deck, if you can walk, you're going to be out there type attitude," he said. Same goes for LSU.

The difference is how LSU looked last time out. The Tigers went into the bye red hot, smoking Mississippi State and Auburn by a combined score Pate put at something like 60-something to 18. But he was quick to point out that those are two of the three worst teams in the league. "That doesn't mean anything," he said. "It just means that LSU still got to do it against quality competition."

Pate predicted the playoff rankings conversation word for word. Someone on TV, he said, will accurately say LSU's losses aren't terrible, "but where are the high-quality wins?" It doesn't matter yet, in Pate's view, because LSU has the chance to secure them over the next three weeks against Alabama, Texas and Tennessee. "Boom, boom, boom."

He has also liked what he has seen from Sam Leavitt, who has been "in the pocket just carving folks up," and Alabama has shown it can be picked apart a little. Pate added a note on the setting. "I don't care what Lane says," he said. "Even at 2:30 Central Time, it's a pretty tough place to play." If Alabama can't protect Russell, "it's going to be a long day for Alabama again."

Then Rich asked Pate to crystal ball it. Georgia, Ole Miss, Alabama, LSU, Texas, Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee make eight SEC teams in the top 19. How many make the 12-team field?

"I've been on four for a while from the SEC," Pate said. "More and more, there's a path to five, but that's if all the losses in the SEC kind of fall the right way." With the top eight all playing each other, losses are going to be scattered around, and the question becomes how many three-loss teams are still in the mix at the finish line.

That has to be stacked against the other conferences. In the Big 12, Pate sketched a scenario where Brigham Young beats Utah Saturday and Utah wins the rematch, which could put three Big 12 teams in. The Big Ten, he admitted, is a mystery. Ohio State, Indiana and undefeated UCLA are all technically in right now, but Pate wondered whether anyone feels supremely confident in any of them given how they have looked. He doesn't know whether the Big Ten gets two teams or three.

All of that, Pate said, will decide whether there is room for a fourth and especially a fifth SEC team.