A look at hypothetical SEC playoff teams during the BCS era

Aaron Brenner of the Post and Courier recently did a hypothetical breakdown of ‘what if’ the College Football Playoff had been in place all along. Go read it.

The breakdown started back in 1936, but let’s take a gander at the results from the BCS era, which started with Tennessee’s 1998 national championship win over Florida State.

RELATED: Ranking the SEC’s best teams during BCS era

Obviously, this is the writer’s opinion, and we have no clue how the 13-member selection committee will react or inherit bias. Nor will we know how they voted, because the committee won’t be as transparent as we want. You thought the BCS was controversial.

There’s so much talk leading into the season about whether the College Football Playoff era will help further the SEC’s dominance by allowing two SEC teams be a part of the four-team playoff. Let’s see how it would have panned out since 1998, as the four teams were finalized by the BCS rankings, via Post and Courier:

Few takeaways:

Throughout the 16 years of the BCS era, at least one SEC team would have made the playoffs 13 times, over 81 percent of the time. The only years an SEC team wouldn’t have been in the four-team playoff was 2000, 2001 and 2005.

In five years – 2006, 2008, 2011, 2012 and 2013 – the SEC would have had multiple teams in the playoffs.

Alabama would have made the playoffs five out of the last six years.

2011’s rematch would have happened anyway, as Alabama and LSU were clearly the two best teams in college football. But I would have loved to have seen the LSU-Stanford and Alabama-Oklahoma State playoff games.

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