Start with the big percentage. It estimates the chance of reaching the conference championship game. It is a forecast, not a guarantee.
A path is one way to get in. It shows the winners your team needs and how the standings would finish.
Pick game winners to try your own ideas. Your picks change your view of the race, not the real results.
A black outline means the team is out. Very small chances stay separate from proven elimination.
Gold means a secured title-game berth. Clinched labels require a mathematical guarantee from completed results, not a rounded model percentage. Conservative checks may leave some tiebreaker-based clinches unconfirmed.
Some tiebreakers still need official inputs. Those paths are labeled as needing a tiebreaker.
Methods, rules and sources
One outcome is one complete set of winners for every remaining conference game. Completed results are fixed. Your selected winners and the win-out filter are also fixed, so the count covers only the games left undecided.
Qualifying combinations put your team in the championship using the currently implemented rules, regardless of the unresolved tiebreaker choices explored. Unresolved combinations still need an external ranking, scoring margin, draw, or another missing input. They are not counted as confirmed qualifying paths.
Percentages: the team chance is a simulation estimate weighted by game win probabilities. Once the exhaustive count completes, a separate range shows how unresolved tiebreakers could affect qualification. Each path card gives the probability of its complete conference-game result combination, conditional on your already locked picks. The selected path also shows the probability of its sufficient required results when that proof finishes. Paths can overlap when requirements are reduced, so those percentages must not be added together. All game probabilities use the current development Elo model and are not historically calibrated.
Seeding: No. 1 / No. 2 filters use implemented seeding rules, not alphabetical order in tied standings. Unknown seeding stays separate. Opponents affected by unresolved tiebreakers are conditional examples. Filters apply to retained path examples, not the overall team chance.
These are exhaustive winner-combination counts once the search finishes, not Monte Carlo samples and not probabilities. Different combinations are not equally likely. While counting, the displayed total is a running count, not the final answer.
A path shows a complete assignment of conference winners and the resulting conference records for every team. Where an unresolved tiebreaker affects the second finalist, the table identifies that uncertainty. Unfinished nonconference games are not assigned invented results.
When “my team wins out” is checked, the path details hide your own remaining game rows and show only the outside results to cheer for. Those wins still count in the standings and probabilities.
The page lists up to 160 illustrative paths, including varied finishes and opponents. The count includes every combination checked, not just the examples displayed. Teams with identical final records can still have different paths because the game results differ.
Coverage: Full policy verification is still in progress. Conference-specific exceptional cases, unavailable SportSource/composite rankings, and future SEC scoring-margin inputs can leave outcomes unresolved. A result resolved by this implementation is not a certification by the conference.