There are the sweet fixtures of every SEC fall.

The Iron Bowl, a mid-to-late November delight of statewide tension and nerves and, ultimately, bragging rights.

The Florida-Tennessee collision, always that early season barometer in late September.

LSU-Bama, the SEC West bloodbath that’s always in the heart of conference season, when the SEC gauntlet is getting crazy, but the stakes are too high for a drop of letdown.

Georgia-Florida, the festive Cocktail Party in Jacksonville usually right around Halloween, a prelude to the November stretch run.

South Carolina against whatever team is put in front of it on that warm and fuzzy first Thursday night in September, or sometimes the last Thursday night in August, when the first sounds of SEC football makes it feel a little less like summer.

And what about the old, riveting rivalries of the South, steeped in hate and tradition and played out around season’s end?

The Egg Bowl. LSU-Arkansas. Tennessee-Vanderbilt.

You love these games because they arrive like clockwork, every season, no matter the records, as checkpoints of time from September through November, as the leaves turn and fall as winter beckons.

This is what SEC fans know.

But what about the games that sneak up on you each season? Every fall, there’s a few. The classics you never saw coming, certainly not in the dead of February and not even on Labor Day.

Right now, most everything is a guessing game. But there might be just a few scattered clues to tip us off of a few of these under-the-radar matchups that could entertain or have a bigger impact on the SEC’s big picture than we realized.

Texas A&M at South Carolina, Oct. 1

There won’t be any Johnny Manziel or even Steve Spurrier, but this matchup in Columbia could be pivotal for the Gamecocks in Will Muschamp’s first season as coach. What direction does South Carolina’s season take?

The Gamecocks have never played three road games in a row to start the conference season. They will this fall, playing their traditional Thursday night opener at Vanderbilt, before trips to Mississippi State and Kentucky. If Muschamp can run the table in that road trio or even go 2-1, it could set the Gamecocks up for the rest of the season.

The A&M game, of course, also will be Muschamp’s home SEC opener, a sort of introduction at Williams-Brice Stadium for a coach not named Spurrier. A victory over the Aggies not only would be a fine first impression in front of 80,250 critical fans but also launch the Gamecocks into their traditional early season clash with Georgia, which is the following week back at Williams-Brice.

A win would also get South Carolina rolling in what amounts to a five-game homestand, with four of those games in the SEC.

As a sidenote, South Carolina’s first road game after that endless home stretch? None other than in Gainesville, where Muschamp spent four mostly disappointing seasons between 2011-14. Might as well count that as one of our under-the-radar games, if only for the reaction that Muschamp will get upon his arrival at The Swamp.

Georgia at Ole Miss, Sept. 24

Another first-year SEC coach, Kirby Smart, will lead his Bulldogs into Oxford, trying to get his program a huge early road win against a program that has made big strides under Hugh Freeze.

It will be the second straight road game to start the conference season for Georgia, after its opener at Missouri, and a win at Ole Miss would be the perfect precursor for Smart’s home conference debut the week after against Tennessee.

Emerging from Oxford with a win against a surging program that just pulled in the best recruiting class in its history would be a powerful early indication that picking Smart was indeed the smart choice.

Kentucky at Florida, Sept. 10

Kentucky at Florida would usually only get the blood boiling if we were talking about basketball. But maybe not this time.

UF is coming off a tremendous bounce-back year after a down period, and the last thing it would want to begin its encore season is to lose at home against perennial punching bag Kentucky, which the Gators have beaten an astounding 29 times in a row. That streak, by the way, almost ended last fall as UF prevailed 14-9 in Lexington, so the Gators shouldn’t be looking ahead.

Also, UF flirted with disaster last season at home against Vanderbilt and, yes, FAU, and the Gators want to set a tone for 2016 that Swamp escape acts won’t be a theme again. UF and Jim McElwain want to pocket this win, preferrably by a bigger margin, before going on with the rest of the SEC season.

Florida at Vanderbilt, Oct. 1

This is one of those rare chances for the Commodores to try to build on something positive, to show that their near upset last fall in Gainesville wasn’t a fluke. We’ll see if Derek Mason, who is just 7-17 in two seasons in Nashville, can earn the signature win so not associated with Vanderbilt football.

La. Tech at Arkansas, Sept. 3

The last one is a curveball. That’s right, it will have been just about a year to the day when the Razorbacks’ 2015 season was turned upside down after a stunning 16-12 loss to Toledo in Little Rock. Arkansas was ranked 18th at the time and had big dreams, but it couldn’t get out of its own way against the Rockets of the Mid-American Conference.

Suddenly, on Sept. 12, any grand plans Arkansas had were crumpled up and tossed in the garbage. Sure, the Hogs rebounded to finish 8-5 overall and 5-3 in the SEC. But they carried that scarlet letter, call it a “T” for Toledo, for the rest of the fall.

The point for coach Bret Bielema against Louisiana Tech, a Conference USA team that went 9-4 last year: Don’t let the early, home, non-conference calamity happen again. It’s what all SEC teams — those powerful, rebuilding and somewhere in between — dread in September.

And this is really the point of these under-the-radar games.

They can be Toledo at Arkansas, the ones you don’t see coming. Or they can be turning points for programs like Vanderbilt looking for fuel or programs like South Carolina and Georgia with first-year coaches looking to make an impression in Year One.

The beauty of the SEC is that we do have those traditional matchups, set in stone, around the same time on the calendar, rotating from one locale to the other.

Another beauty is that hard-core fans of this conference can embrace each and every Saturday, because there are so few. And that makes the under-the-radar ones, euphoric or painful, just as vital as those we plan all year for.