College football fans spend the entire offseason dreaming about possible postseason bowl destinations. And with the SEC changing its bowl lineup for the next 6 years, fans of SEC teams can picture themselves in a few new destinations. (Vegas, baby!)

But right now, any destination will do.

The coronavirus pandemic has thrown a wrench into every aspect of life. For the SEC, the immediate result is a 10-game, conference-only schedule. The conference released the full schedule Monday, giving fans another look at the freshly designed path to postseason glory.

The Big Ten and Pac-12 have decided against playing football this fall, as have the Mountain West and Mid-American Conference. That’s 50 conference-aligned teams sitting out in fall 2020 plus a handful of independents. So there’s no way all of the slots for 42 scheduled bowls (even after the Redbox Bowl was canceled) will be filled.

We aren’t sure how conference tie-ins will be rearranged, or how the bowl lineup will be decided, assuming a 2020 season even gets that far.

But let’s say that the SEC, ACC and Big 12, plus a few Group of 5 leagues, do get to play this season. If that happens, we think the SEC’s usual suspects will contend for College Football Playoff and New Year’s Day 6 bowl spots.

Even more so without two Power 5 conferences. Especially when one team — the only one to go to New Year’s Day 6 bowls in each of the 6 seasons since the CFP/NYD6 system was instituted in 2014 — is excluded: Ohio State.

OSU would have been a contender for a Playoff spot for sure. Buckeyes quarterback Justin Fields created a petition asking Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren to reverse the league’s decision to scuttle all fall sports and more than 150,000 had signed it by Sunday night.

But for now, this set of projections will assume that there is no B1G or Pac-12 to contend with in fall 2020. This absence scrambles things so severely (remember how many bowls match the SEC vs. the B1G) that, again we have no idea how these bowl arrangements will shake out or even how many postseason games will be played.

So for now, outside of the CFP and New Year’s Day 6, we’re just going to say TBA for the SEC’s bowl opponents. And with only 3 Power 5 conferences playing, one of those leagues should send 2 representatives to fill the 4-team Playoff field.

Guess which conference?

We think Alabama and Georgia will represent the SEC in the CFP. Their regular-season meeting should go a long way toward determining which one goes where. But doesn’t a rematch of the epic 2017 national title game sound juicy for the SEC?

A reminder from the bowl projections we released in January: The new contracts for the SEC bowl tie-ins run from 2020 through 2025. This year the SEC adds the Las Vegas Bowl to its lineup; the SEC and Big Ten will alternate places in Sin City for the next 6 years. The SEC will send a team to Vegas in even-numbered years and the Duke’s Mayo Bowl (formerly the Belk Bowl) in Charlotte will get an SEC team in odd-numbered years.

As in past years, the Citrus Bowl in Orlando gets first pick after the CFP and NYD6 bowl grab their SEC teams. After that, 6 postseason SEC destinations are considered equal: The Las Vegas, Outback, Liberty, Gator, Texas and Music City bowls. After that, if any eligible SEC teams remain, the Birmingham Bowl and Gasparilla Bowl make their selections. But in recent years the SEC always has run out of bowl-eligible teams before it has run out of bowl tie-ins. That especially figures to be true in a year when the SEC won’t have nonconference games where middling teams can fatten up their win totals to reach bowl eligibility.

Let’s cross our fingers that we get to see SEC football in the fall. If we do, here is our best guess at the bowl destinations for the league’s teams.:

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