Right from the start, part of the bargain SEC fans made with this season was that the general lack of drama throughout the year would be worth it if it culminated in a climactic, winner-take-all showdown between Georgia and Alabama in the SEC Championship Game, and despite Georgia’s midseason lapse at LSU it’s just one week from delivering fully on that promise.

The Dawgs and Tide are both heavy favorites this weekend against their in-state rivals, the last remaining hurdles on the way to a Dec. 1 collision in Atlanta that will serve as a de facto quarterfinal game in the College Football Playoff. It’s the scene we’ve been waiting for from the moment the confetti began to drop on the last Bama-Georgia showdown in January, and barring a wild turn of events on Saturday, it’s the one we’re going to get.

The drama of the rematch is straightforward: Win and you’re in. For Georgia, which already bears the L it took in Baton Rouge, the flip side is also clear: Lose, you go home. (Or to the Sugar Bowl, which is not a bad consolation prize, but still.) For Bama, on the other hand, the situation might be a little less cut-and-dry. As much as it kills Tide fans to contemplate any alternative to total victory, the reality is there are still multiple ways for the top-heavy Playoff race to leave a backdoor open to the Final Four — the same door they walked through last year after flubbing their regular-season finale at Auburn — even for a team that loses in its conference championship game. And if any team is in position to exploit a shifting landscape down the stretch, once again, it’s Alabama.

With that in mind, I’ve outlined four plausible scenarios over the next two weeks (some more plausible than others) that begin with the unthinkable question — what if the Crimson Tide, you know, lose? — and end with Alabama realistically vying for a Playoff ticket anyway, if not claiming one outright.

There might be others, if you’re willing to toggle through the endless possible outcomes on the remaining schedule; these are the ones that give the SEC the best shot of getting a second team into the field for the second year in a row without imagining, say, Kyler Murray being declared ineligible, or a black hole forming in the middle of Michigan’s practice field. They also begin with a few baseline assumptions that apply to each scenario:

1. Eight teams are still realistically alive for the Playoff, three of which (Alabama, Clemson, and Notre Dame) are 11-0 and can hypothetically afford a loss in certain scenarios. The other five (Michigan, Georgia, Oklahoma, Washington State and Ohio State) are all 10-1 and must win out.

2. Bama and Georgia will win their respective rivalry games against Auburn and Georgia Tech. To keep this manageable, we’ll also assume Clemson takes care of business against South Carolina. The chaos that will reign if the chalk goes bust in any of those games is beyond our scope.

3. If Oklahoma and/or Michigan win out, both the Sooners (12-1, Big 12 champs) and Wolverines (12-1, Big Ten champs) will make the cut over a 12-1 Alabama outfit that fails to win its conference.

4. Texas will beat Kansas to advance to the Big 12 Championship Game against the winner of Oklahoma/West Virginia on Friday night, eliminating any chance of an OU-WVU rematch.

Scenario 1: The Rematch

1. Notre Dame > USC to finish 12-0
2. Clemson wins out to finish 13-0 (ACC champion)
3. Ohio State > Michigan and Northwestern to finish 12-1 (Big Ten champion)
4. West Virginia > Oklahoma or Texas > Oklahoma in Big 12 Championship Game
5. Washington > Washington State or Utah > Washington State in Pac-12 Championship Game
– – –
Result: Clemson, Notre Dame, and Georgia are IN; final spot falls to Alabama vs. Ohio State.

Short of a landscape-shifting upset in the ACC or Big Ten championship games, Alabama’s most realistic, least-weird bet is the same scenario that worked in its favor last year: A Selection Sunday decision between the Crimson Tide and Ohio State for the fourth and final spot. For that to happen, Bama should not only root for the Buckeyes to beat Michigan, but also for Oklahoma to bite the dust this weekend at West Virginia or in the Big 12 title game.

If the question does come down to Bama-OSU II, the Buckeyes’ case will rest (just as it did last year) on the fact that they boast a conference championship and Alabama doesn’t, with the added bonus that this year’s team will necessarily come into the debate with only one loss after the 2017 Buckeyes were snubbed for having two. But that loss is an ugly one, a primetime, 49-20 flop against a mediocre Purdue outfit that’s dropped 3 of 3 since; the fact that the committee has held Ohio State steady at No. 10 in each of the first three sets of rankings is a sign that it’s taking the collapse in West Lafayette heavily into account.

In the most recent edition, that left OSU behind LSU, Washington State and West Virginia, and just one spot ahead of Central Florida, which has a good case for leaping the Buckeyes this week. Saturday’s down-to-the-wire, overtime escape at Maryland certainly isn’t going to boost their stock.

Of course, that could all change very quickly in the wake of an emotional, season-defining win over Michigan to lock up the Big Ten East, especially if the Buckeyes follow it up by hammering a Northwestern squad that looks like it’s going to be in way over its head in the B1G title game. An awful lot in this scenario hinges on how impressive Ohio State’s presumptive victory in that one turns out to be, style points-wise, relative to Alabama’s hypothetical setback in Atlanta. If there’s any doubt, though, Bama’s consistent, week-in, week-out dominance throughout the season is a stark contrast to OSU’s ramshackle track record and may very well put the Tide over the top again.

Scenario 2: Chaos Theory A

1. Michigan > Ohio State and Northwestern to finish 12-1 (Big Ten champion)
2. Washington State > Washington and Utah to finish 12-1 (Pac-12 champion)
3. West Virginia > Oklahoma or Texas > Oklahoma in Big 12 Championship Game
4. USC > Notre Dame or Pitt > Clemson in ACC Championship Game
– – –
Result: Michigan, Georgia, and Clemson or ND are IN; final spot falls to Alabama vs. Clemson/ND and Washington State.

It’s probably too much to ask for both Clemson and Notre Dame to drop a game at this point, given that they’re both heavily favored to win out. At least one of those two teams is going to finish off a perfect regular season. But if Alabama fails to join them, a lapse by the Tigers or Fighting Irish would be an ideal scenario, and maybe a necessary one depending on how the other dominoes fall. In that case, the Tide should expect to remain ahead of their fellow last-second loser regardless of the circumstances.

The wild card in this scenario is Washington State: The Cougars are surging, winners of seven straight since dropping a 39-36 heartbreaker at USC in September; although they don’t have any Top 25 wins on their résumé at the moment, they will in the final accounting if they finish off Washington (No. 18 in the current committee rankings) and Utah (No. 19) en route to an unlikely Pac-12 title. As long as the final score against Georgia is respectable, Alabama can probably count on coming in ahead of Wazzu on brand-name alone. Just don’t be surprised if the Cougars make it through to 12-1 if there’s enough of a groundswell behind them to make Bama sweat it out.

Scenario 3: Chaos Theory B

1. Ohio State > Michigan and Northwestern to finish 12-1 (Big Ten champion)
2. Oklahoma > West Virginia and Texas to finish 12-1 (Big 12 champion)
3. Washington State > Washington and Utah to finish 12-1 (Pac-12 champion)
4. USC > Notre Dame or Pitt > Clemson in ACC Championship Game
– – –
Result: Georgia, Oklahoma, and Clemson or ND are IN; final spot falls to Alabama vs. Clemson/ND, Ohio State, and Washington State.

This is essentially a recapitulation of Scenario 2, except with Michigan biting the dust in the Big Ten instead of Oklahoma in the Big 12; that would be less ideal for the Tide, who would then have to prevail in a 4-way deadlock in which two of the other options would be boosted by conference championships. Remove Washington State from this equation, and the Ohio State-Bama showdown still looms large.

Scenario 4: The Bloodbath

1. Notre Dame > USC to finish 12-0
2. Clemson wins out to finish 13-0 (ACC champion)
3. Northwestern > Ohio State/Michigan in the Big Ten Championship Game
4. West Virginia > Oklahoma or Texas > Oklahoma in Big 12 Championship Game
5. Washington > Washington State or Utah > Washington State in Pac-12 Championship Game
– – –
Result: Clemson, Notre Dame, Georgia, and Alabama are IN.

The best possible scenario for Alabama — the only one that essentially guarantees the Tide a spot even with a loss in Atlanta — is also the unlikeliest: A bloodbath in which the also-rans in Big Ten, Big 12, and Pac-12 devour their last remaining contenders, knocking those conferences out of the picture entirely. Even if Clemson holds serve in the ACC, that would leave an open spot for 12-1 Bama more or less by default. Don’t hold your breath, but it’s there.

In fact, this scenario is so merciless it’s the only one in which can reverse the outcome in the SEC title game, project Georgia to lose, and still give the Bulldogs a realistic chance of landing the final Playoff spot amid the carnage. In the 4-year history of the Playoff format, a 2-loss team has yet to the make the cut; in this scenario, though — farfetched as it is — the committee would be left with no choice. If came to that, Georgia could be that choice.

The upshot of this exercise is that, despite the sense of inevitability that’s surrounded the Crimson Tide’s season from opening night on, their margin for error actually remains as narrow as ever. If worse comes to worse, it would be in their interest for either Ohio State or (bless them) Northwestern to knock off Michigan in the Big Ten, and for someone other than Oklahoma to come out on top in the Big 12. It would help if a reeling USC outfit stunned Notre Dame, or Clemson fed its entire defensive line some bad shrimp or something before the ACC Championship Game. These things happen. But the only sure thing is entirely up to Bama itself.

Notebook

Around the conference.

The Hat Is Back

After two years out of the game, former LSU coach Les Miles will be back on the sideline next season as the head coach at Kansas. Here’s the job in front of him, based on the last nine years’ worth of calculations by Jeff Sagarin, Football Reference’s Simple Rating System, and Bill Connelly’s S&P+ ratings:

That’s not the normal trajectory of a bad team with ebbs and flows and the occasional run at a bowl game. That’s nearly a decade straight of consistent, rock-bottom bad unmatched by any other major program, to the extent that it’s become hard to gauge what progress even looks like.

At times Beaty (who’s finishing out the regular season after being fired earlier this month) seemed to have the program on the right track, springing out-of-the-blue upsets over Texas in 2016 and TCU earlier this year, but only relative to the smoking crater he inherited from Weis. It’s the kind of job where coaches are hired to be fired. When Beaty took over, it was understood that he’d be judged less by wins and losses by some vague sense of overall competitiveness and forward momentum; four years in, he’s delivered none of the above.

That’s the 180-degree opposite of Miles’ last job, which (as you may recall) ended badly amid a similar sense of stagnation and frustration. Granted, frustration looks a lot different at LSU than it does at Kansas, but it’s not for nothing that Miles’ later teams in Baton Rouge were considered underachievers. His first seven seasons, from 2005-11, yielded a national championship and 5 top-10 finishes in the AP poll; his last five seasons, zero top-10 finishes or appearances in a major bowl game. From 2013-16 the Tigers topped out at 5-3 in SEC play despite boasting a roster that had nearly three dozen players drafted in that span. Kansas had four players drafted in that span.

So while it’s clear that Miles, at 65, is a “build a solid foundation for the next guy” kind of hire, it’s not at all clear what that means in practice, or how he figures to go about it any differently than his doomed predecessors. (As opposed to a triple-option coach, for example, who would have brought a distinct vision for what he wanted the team to look like and the kind of players he planned to recruit from the moment he stepped off the plane.) Miles is a big name and a potential short-term boon to fundraising and attendance, but he’s not a strategic innovator, to say the least. His pick for offensive coordinator could be a make-or-break hire in a league defined by the ability to keep pace on offense.

If three years from now he has the Jayhawks in contention for a bowl game at this point on the calendar, that will be considered a massive success story — Miles’ contract actually calls for an automatic one-year extension the first time he hits six wins in a season. If not, then what? Another headstone in the Kansas coaching graveyard, and the cycle starts over from scratch.

Georgia 66, UMass 27

A blowout win over a random, bottom-dwelling outfit was interesting for one reason and one reason only: Justin Fields’ arm. For most of the season, the Bulldogs’ massively hyped freshman phenom has been limited to spot duty in a de facto Wildcat role or, occasionally, a handful of garbage-time throws against the dregs of the schedule. Technically, Saturday fell into the latter category, except for the fact that the token throws against the Minutemen showed off a different level of downfield accuracy than we’ve seen from Fields to date.

He finished 5-of-8 for 121 yards and 2 TDs, missing out on another long score when WR Demetris Robinson let a perfect throw into the end zone go through his hands in the third quarter. More predictably, Fields went for a career-high 100 yards rushing, almost half of that total coming on a 47-yard run in the first half.

Yes, it was UMass, caveats, etc. But given his most extensive playing time of the season, Fields showed off a much fuller picture of the skill set at his disposal when his time comes to take over the offense full-time, whenever that might be. In the meantime, opposing defensive coordinators suddenly have a lot more to worry about when he subs in for Jake Fromm.

Vanderbilt 36, Ole Miss 29 (OT)

It’s time again for America’s least favorite game, Is This a Catch?

On today’s episode, welcome Ole Miss WR A.J. Brown, a human highlight reel who, with the Rebels trailing 36-29 in overtime, capped a career night in Nashville with a potentially game-tying touchdown grab. Ready? You know what to do: IS. THIS. A CATCH?!

If you said yes, that is a catch … ooooh, sorry. No. While it contained many common and seemingly obvious elements of a catch — full possession of the ball with two feet, a whole butt, and eventually Brown’s entire back flat on the ground, in bounds, in the end zone — after further review officials overturned their initial ruling of a touchdown and ruled the pass incomplete. (The SEC responded with a post-game statement maintaining Brown did not “maintain complete and continuous control of the ball throughout the process of contacting the ground.”)

Instead of putting the Rebels in position to tie or win with a 2-point conversion, the reversal put them in a decisive 4th-and-6 situation which they failed to convert, thereby sealing Vandy’s fifth win and keeping the Commodores’ faint bowl hopes alive going into next week’s finale against Tennessee. Thanks for playing another bitter and inexplicable installment of Is This a Catch?

For the record, the direct reason the game was in overtime was Ole Miss’ decision — as a 5-5 team banned from the postseason — to pass up an imminently makable 4th-and-1 attempt from Vanderbilt’s 15-yard line at the end of regulation in favor of a game-tying field goal instead. Maybe one dubious call deserves another.

Superlatives

The best of Week 12 …

1. Kentucky DB Mike Edwards. Edwards was everywhere in the Wildcats’ 34-23 win over Middle Tennessee, finishing with 12 tackles, a pair of tackles for loss, a forced fumble, and a pick-6 that he returned 66 yards for the opening score of the game.

He shares the top spot this week with his more decorated teammate, LB Josh Allen, whose notched 2 sacks against the Blue Raiders (to go with his team-high 15 tackles), pulling him to within one sack of the national lead this season vs. FBS opponents.

2. Mississippi State DB Johnathan Abram. Abram, a senior who began his college career at Georgia, led the Bulldogs’ Senior-Day feeding frenzy against Arkansas with 12 tackles (a career high), 4 TFLs (also a career high), 2 sacks, and 2 QB hurries for good measure. One of his sacks resulted in a forced fumble, which he also recovered. When your uniforms look this good you have no choice but to play up to the aesthetics.

3. Ole Miss WRs A.J. Brown and DaMarkus Lodge. The controversial ending overshadowed a spectacular night for the Rebels’ soon-to-be-very-wealthy wideouts, who hauled in 9 catches apiece for 329 yards (212 for Brown, 117 for Lodge), 2 touchdowns, and multiple highlight-reel efforts. (See below.) That marked Brown’s first career 200-yard receiving game vs. an SEC opponent, with one more to go this Thursday against Mississippi State before he takes his talents to the next level.

4. Texas A&M RB Trayveon Williams. Statistically, UAB boasted one of the stingiest defenses in the nation coming into Saturday night’s prove-it game in College Station, putting a little extra oomph in Williams’ 167-yard, 2-TD output than you’d usually expect vs. a Conference USA opponent. The Aggies handed the Blazers with ease, 41-20, and Williams widened his SEC lead over Benny Snell Jr. for total yards from scrimmage.

5. Missouri DB DeMarkus Acy. Acy recorded both of Mizzou’s interceptions in a surprising, 50-17 blowout at Tennessee, both of which led to short-field touchdowns for the Tiger offense in the rout.

Honorable Mention: LSU LB Devin White, who turned in a team-high 9 tackles, a sack, a pass broken up, and a QB hurry in an effortless, 42-10 romp over Rice. … LSU QB Joe Burrow, who went 20-for-28 against Rice for 307 yards and oversaw TD drives that covered 79, 66, 79, 88, and 90 yards, respectively. … Mississippi State QB Nick Fitzgerald, who accounted for 216 total yards and 5 touchdowns (four passing, one rushing) in the Bulldogs’ dismantling of Arkansas. … Vanderbilt RB Ke’Shawn Vaughn, who rolled up 127 yards on 25 carries in the Commodores’ win over Ole Miss, scoring once. … Missouri RB Larry Rountree III, who went for 135 yards and a touchdown on 26 carries in the Tigers’ blowout win at Tennessee. … And ESPN sideline reporter Laura Rutledge, who took a blindside shot in the Georgia-UMass game and rolled with the punches.

Catch of the Year of the Week: DaMarkus Lodge

Ole Miss receivers have occupied this spot on a regular basis over the past few years, but Lodge’s whirling, one-handed gem of a touchdown against Vanderbilt may be the most impressive entry they’ve submitted yet.

Pity that poor Vanderbilt defender, who was in perfect position and had no chance. But then, nine times out of ten, neither does that throw.