This Saturday, the College GameDay crew will be live from Columbus, Ohio. Ohio State and Penn State will face off in a battle of top-10 teams. That in itself is enough of a reason for the popular pregame show to make the trip back to the Midwest a week after it crashed the party at Penn State.

It’ll be GameDay’s second time visiting the Ohio State campus this year. That’s as many times as GameDay has visited ACC campuses this season. Even more noteworthy is that OSU will have hosted GameDay twice compared to one visit for the entire Big 12. Piggybacking off of that, OSU has hosted GameDay more than the Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC combined.

Shoot, GameDay even went to FCS James Madison and the city of New York in the first nine weeks of this season.

Still, an SEC campus has yet to play host to the crew in 2017. Katy Perry hasn’t waived a corndog and bashed LSU. Lee Corso hasn’t brought up Uga to use as his Georgia big head. We haven’t even seen an upset-hungry SEC campus loaded with “We Want Bama” signs yet. With that in mind, any notions of ESPN having an SEC bias can fade.

So what is it that’s keeping GameDay from heading down to the SEC? And just how rare is it that GameDay stays away from the SEC schools for this long to start off a season?

Let’s tackle the history question first.

Since the show began in 1995 through the 2016 season, GameDay averaged 3.1 visits per year to SEC campuses. Keep in mind, that does NOT include neutral-site games, nor does it count if an SEC squad is the road team at a GameDay site.

In the past 15 years (2002-16), the show averaged 3.5 visits to SEC campuses. In the last five years, GameDay averaged 4.2 trips per year to SEC schools. In each of those five seasons, the crew hosted from an SEC site at least once every September. Only four times in the show’s history did it not make it to the SEC in September.

One of those years was 2011. That season followed a similar blueprint to this one. GameDay broke its SEC drought on Nov. 5 when it traveled to Alabama. It might not have felt like the SEC was completely snubbed that year because LSU played in the neutral-site opener in Dallas and three weeks later it was the road team when GameDay went to West Virginia.

The 2017 season has been a bit of an outlier. GameDay went to Atlanta for the mammoth Alabama-Florida State showdown, but an SEC team hasn’t even taken part in any other GameDay site.

The question is why? Why has this year been the perfect storm for a lack of GameDay interest in SEC schools?

Without getting into TV contracts and making judgments based off that, let’s keep it simple. There have been few games that warranted GameDay consideration. Unless it’s a season opener on a non-Saturday like Indiana-Ohio State, GameDay usually only visits games that feature two ranked opponents. And GameDay doesn’t often travel to campuses when a team is coming off a loss.

Here are all of the SEC games that would’ve met that criteria in 2017:

Week 4: No. 17 Mississippi State vs. No. 11 Georgia

That’s it.

On the season, there have only been three games that featured two ranked SEC teams. The others were No. 23 Tennessee vs. No. 24 Florida — it was a good thing GameDay stayed away from that one — and No. 24 Mississippi State vs. No. 13 Auburn. Instead of Tennessee-Florida, GameDay rolled with Oklahoma-Ohio State in Week 3. And instead of MSU-Auburn, GameDay went to New York City.

For what it’s worth, the NYC announcement came more than a week in advance. That’s a rarity for GameDay, which usually announces its next destination exactly one week before. That — plus the fact that you can’t just show up to Times Square on a few days notice — suggests it had been in the works since before the start of the season.

Starting to make sense?

In all likelihood, GameDay will make it to an SEC campus in the next week or two. LSU-Alabama seems like a likely choice in Week 10, as does Georgia-Auburn in Week 11 and the Iron Bowl in Week 13. It wouldn’t be surprising if GameDay made it to two of those three College Football Playoff-implication games.

If GameDay only makes it to one SEC campus in the final four weeks of the regular season, it’ll mark the first time that happened since 2000. Mark Richt wasn’t even at Georgia yet. Nick Saban was in his first season at LSU. Steve Spurrier hadn’t left Florida for the Washington Redskins yet.

The SEC has changed a lot since then. The conference has even changed a lot since 2014, when GameDay visited a whopping six (!) SEC campuses.

Times are indeed different in the SEC, and GameDay’s absence reflects that.