Kentucky has a lot at stake in Saturday’s Governor’s Cup showdown with Louisville, and so does the SEC.

If Kentucky wins Saturday to snap a recent five-game losing streak, it would earn bowl eligibility for the first time since 2010. It would also become the SEC’s 13th bowl eligible team this season (assuming Tennessee takes care of Vanderbilt), which would mean as much to the conference as a whole as it would to the Kentucky program.

I shouldn’t have to explain why reaching a bowl game would be a huge accomplishment for Kentucky (evidence of improvement this season, extra practices, added national exposure, etc.), but for the SEC to be able to claim 13 of its 14 member programs as bowl eligible would be just as impactful.

The conference prides itself on being the best in the country, and most fans outside the conference love nothing more than to poke holes in that claim. The SEC has more ranked teams this week than any other conference in America, and it has two teams in line to reach the inaugural four-team College Football Playoff. The haters respond with cries of “SEC bias.”

But what isn’t biased is a team’s win-loss record, and if Kentucky wins on Saturday 13 of the SEC’s 14 teams would have .500 records or better. How does one counter that statement? You can’t claim “SEC bias” and you can’t claim top-heaviness. That kind of depth is unprecedented in college football. Two of the nation’s five power conferences don’t even have that many members.

Do you realize how dominant the SEC has been outside the conference this year to have that many even-or-better records? All 14 teams play two-thirds of their schedules within the conference, beating up on one another each and every week. No one will escape the conference this season without a loss.

With eight grueling SEC games holding every team back, 13 of them may still win as many games as they lose. And it’s not just the product of easy scheduling. Yes, every SEC team has a few cupcakes on the schedule, but the SEC is also 5-2 against other power conference teams, including wins over Wisconsin, Clemson, West Virginia and Kansas State.

If Kentucky wins Saturday you can add Louisville to that list, and South Carolina, Florida and Georgia will look to do the same in their intrastate SEC-ACC rivalries this weekend.

Most SEC fans are focused on who will win the conference’s two divisions and how many teams the conference will send to the playoff. But even if the SEC sends two teams to the playoff, a Kentucky victory would be just as meaningful in this sense — the playoff is subjective but records are literal. Fans can argue the SEC was “granted” two playoff teams by the collective opinion of 12 imperfect humans, but it can’t argue against 13 six-win teams.

Let’s compare Kentucky to the 13th best team in the other power conferences with at least that many members, the Big Ten and the ACC. The Big Ten’s 13th best team is either Indiana or Purdue.

I already know what you’re going to say.

Indiana beat Missouri! Indiana beat Missouri!

Yes they did. But all 13 SEC teams in question have at least twice that many wins in the SEC, while Indiana hasn’t won a single game in the Big Ten. Indiana was better than Missouri on that day. If it were a better team this season, it would have a better record than 3-8.

The 13th best team in the ACC is either Syracuse or Wake Forrest. Both are 3-8 overall and 1-6 in the conference, and both average fewer than 18 points per game (all 13 SEC teams in this discussion average at least 27 points per game).

This is all to say that Kentucky at 5-6 is far better than those aforementioned teams, and a win against Louisville would cement that fact.

In that sense, Kentucky is as crucial to the SEC’s argument for being the best conference as Alabama and Mississippi State, which have both spent most of the year ranked in the top 10.

Among all the rivalry games on the Week 14 slate, the Governor’s Cup is sure to be lost in the shuffle outside the commonwealth of Kentucky. Nevertheless, the Cats can quietly affirm the SEC as the deepest, and thus best top-to-bottom, conference in America.