In a related story, Auburn’s playing Georgia

Published 7:00 pm Friday, December 1, 2017

Auburn and Georgia evidently will play in the Southeastern Conference championship game Saturday, and not — as you may seen on the internet — because they are the only two SEC teams that have a head coach to oversee things.

There are several others, I’m pretty sure.

But Auburn-Georgia figures to be entertaining.

It seems a long, long time ago — and funnier by the year — but on the eve of the first SEC Championship game in 1992, respected Alabama coach Gene Stallings predicted that the foolhardy game would assure that the conference would never win another national championship.

A month later, Alabama won the SEC’s first national championship since Georgia since 1980.

In fact, it ushered in the golden age of the SEC. Since then, the league has won 12 national championships, and at least seven of them were not named Alabama.

Five different teams have done it, even Tennessee.

It was easy to understand Stallings’ trepidations, however.

It was just one more obstacle in the way of getting to a national championship game, and that was in the era immediately preceding the Bowl Championship Series.

His fears never really materialized.

When it has mattered, generally the “right” team has always won the SEC title game — i.e., the one that could advance to some form of a national championship game and win.

Only once has the “wrong” team won, and even that year it was pretty popular in Louisiana.

Tennessee could have reached the BCS title game in 2003 with a win in Atlanta. But 9-3 LSU (it was a down year in the West Division) won 31-20 and the SEC watched from the sidelines.

That’s the only time an upset kept the SEC team from competing for the big one.

But without the SEC title game victories as a sweetener, LSU would not have made the BCS game for either of its national championships in 2003 and ’07.

Same thing for Florida in 1996, Tennessee in 1998, several others.

Just an aside: Maybe today the SEC game’s TV timeouts could be utilized, one at a time and with great fanfare, for the various conference schools to announce who their new head coaches will be.

Sort of the way those hokey high school all-star games are mainly used as platforms for prep studs to reveal their destinations of higher-type learning.

You could even break out the ball caps so some of the top candidates could tease the fandoms with those shell-game gyrations before donning the headwear of the lucky winner.

But back to today’s game.

It’s complicated by being a rematch, this Georgia and Auburn thing.

But even that hasn’t been the nightmare you might think. That 2002 LSU-Tennessee game was a rematch — the Vols won earlier in the regular season — but that is the lone evidence of that beating a team twice conundrum getting in the way.

It’s not a factor today anyway.

This year it really doesn’t matter to the SEC office (and, no, you skeptic you, not because Alabama isn’t even in it).

This is basically a play-in game for the College Football Playoff. Winner is in. It will be an SEC team.

Just another aside: They might want to slot five or six TV timeouts for Tennessee to get a head coach announced … then protested, announced again, turned down, announced again and — even then — he’ll probably put on the wrong ball cap and mess up the solemn ceremony.

But back to the actual game.

A quick survey within the rest of the SEC suggests that the best thing about the no-lose Georgia-Auburn matchup is that no matter which team wins, it’s not going to help Alabama get into the playoff.

The Tide will need a lot of help from other locales.

You can assume the ACC title game winner — Miami vs. No. 1 Clemson — is also a shoo-in for the playoffs.

So that’s two teams.

It’s gets very simple if Oklahoma beats TCU in the Big 12 game and Wisconsin beats Ohio State in the Big Ten. That’s two more and, kazaam, there’s your final four.

OK, another aside: Sort of like a mass walk of shame, maybe all the coaches who have turned down the Tennessee job in the immediate 48 hours preceding kickoff could be escorted to midfield to take part in the pregame coin toss.

But back to regular scheduled columnizing.

If Wisconsin and/or Oklahoma doesn’t win, then it gets interesting.

Alabama is back in play. If Ohio State has beaten Wisconsin, it could come down to Bama in a beauty pageant against the Buckeyes.

Terms like “quality (or embarrassment) of loss” and the “eye test” enter the conversation, the ratings for Sunday morning’s announcement show go through the roof.

One more aside: Let some fans come down at halftime of the SEC title game, throw footballs toward the Dr. Pepper cutout, and the first lucky competitor to nail one gets to be the next Tennessee head coach.

Complete with a lucrative buyout.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at shobbs@americanpress.com