The college football season is almost here. The SEC is still the deepest conference in college football, but they are not as good at the top of the conference. The Big Ten has produced the last three national champions. This is the year for the SEC to prove it hasn’t been surpassed as the elite conference in the country.
Here is a breakdown of the odds to win the SEC, the win totals for each team and the best futures bets to make.
2026 Odds to Win the SEC
SEC Win Totals
- Alabama: o/u 8.5 wins (-120/+100)
- Arkansas: o/u 3.5 wins (-156/+130)
- Auburn: o/u 6.5 wins (-115/+105)
- Florida: o/u 7.5 wins (+130/-156)
- Georgia: o/u 9.5 wins (-180/+150)
- Kentucky: o/u 4.5 wins (-148/+124)
- LSU: o/u 8.5 wins (-115/-105)
- Mississippi State: o/u 4.5 wins (-120/+100)
- Missouri: o/u 6.5 wins (-120/+100)
- Oklahoma: o/u 7.5 wins (-148/+124)
- Ole Miss: o/u 7.5 wins (-166/+130)
- South Carolina: o/u 6.5 wins (+110/-130)
- Tennessee: o/u 7.5 wins (-125/+105)
- Texas: o/u 9.5 wins (+120/-142)
- Texas A&M: o/u 8.5 wins (+100/-120)
- Vanderbilt: o/u 5.5 wins (-130/+110)
SEC Preview
This is a big year for the SEC. From 2006 to 2022, the SEC won 13 out of 17 national championships. However, the Big Ten has now won three straight national titles with three different teams from 2023 to 2025. That marked the first three-year stretch without an SEC national champion from 2000 to 2002. The conference will be desperate to get back to the top of the mountain, with Georgia and Texas as its top contenders this season. Both programs rank among the five teams with the best odds to win the national title this year.
The most significant change in the SEC this offseason was Lane Kiffin moving from Ole Miss to LSU. After leading Ole Miss to the College Football Playoff last season, Kiffin moved over to LSU and brought in former Arizona State quarterback Sam Leavitt to lead his new team. Billy Napier was also fired from his role at Florida, and the Gators brought in former Tulane coach Jon Sumrall to replace him.
This season seems like a tipping point for many coaches in the SEC. Between 2020 and 2022, Texas hired Steve Sarkisian, Oklahoma hired Brent Venables, South Carolina hired Shane Beamer, Tennessee hired Josh Heupel, Missouri hired Eliah Drinkwitz and Vanderbilt hired Clark Lea. All of those coaches have seen varying levels of success to hang onto their jobs as long as they have, but for many of them it is time to prove that they can win at a high level if they want to stick around much longer. Even for newer hires like Kalen DeBoer and Mike Elko it’s a big season to prove that they can get their programs to the next level.
Best SEC Futures
Georgia to win the SEC (+260)
With so much change in the SEC over the past few years, the one mainstay has been Kirby Smart at Georgia. Smart is now headed into Year 11 in Athens and is looking to get back to the mountaintop. Smart won back-to-back national titles with Georgia in 2021 and 2022 before this drought that the SEC has been on. While Curt Cignetti can now make a strong case, for my money, Kirby Smart is still the best coach in the country. Smart and Dabo Swinney are the only active head coaches that have won multiple national championships.
While he has gone three years without winning a national title, Smart’s consistency in the SEC has been remarkable. Georgia has made the SEC title game in eight of the past nine years, and has won the conference title two years running.
Those historical figures would indicate there is an incredibly strong chance that Georgia makes the SEC title game. If they make it, their most likely opponent would be Texas. Since Texas joined the SEC, Georgia is 3-0 against the Longhorns. That includes beating them in the 2024 SEC Championship Game and thrashing them in Athens last season. Steve Sarkisian can’t seem to crack the code on Kirby Smart. So, until that changes, I would always back Smart over Sarkisian in a big game.
This Georgia team is also loaded with talent. Gunner Stockton is incredibly experienced at this point and is the exact type of quarterback that Smart won his national titles with. Between Stockton and the running back duo of Nate Frazier and Chauncey Bowens, Georgia will have one of the best running games in the country. They are also stacked on defense, especially in the secondary. Between talent and coaching, they likely have a top-three defense in college football.
Despite the flashy names like Arch Manning, Sam Leavitt and Marcel Reed challenging in the SEC, I will back Gunner Stockton and Kirby Smart to win another SEC title in 2026.
Alabama to make the CFP (+154)
This is a massive season for Kalen DeBoer. Replacing Nick Saban is the hardest thing that an incoming head coach has had to do in college football this century. It was worsened by the fact that DeBoer had no real ties to Alabama or the SEC, and that he had never won the big one, putting even more skepticism on him from the Alabama fanbase. There is no doubt that DeBoer is a fantastic head coach, but he needs to show he can get to that next level, or the Crimson Tide fanbase won’t want him around much longer.
DeBoer only won nine games in his first season in Tuscaloosa, but bounced back with a much better effort in 2025. The Crimson Tide made the SEC Championship Game and won a game in the College Football Playoff before losing to the eventual national champions, Indiana, in the Rose Bowl. That certainly earned DeBoer some trust, but even more than that is expected at Alabama. While this doesn’t seem like the season for the Crimson Tide to win the SEC or make a real run at a national title, they should get back to the College Football Playoff.
Keelon Russell is expected to take over at quarterback, and the uber-talented redshirt freshman is capable of great things. Russell also fits perfectly into the mold that DeBoer and offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb like in their quarterbacks. He is much closer to the great Michael Penix Jr., who Grubb and DeBoer went to a national title game with, than Jalen Milroe was. Russell will also have excellent weapons to work with, most notably Ryan Coleman-Williams. Alabama will also be strong defensively, especially in the secondary.
The schedule also breaks well for Alabama. A home game against Georgia and a road game against LSU are the only spots where Alabama might be underdogs this season. Games against East Carolina, Kentucky, Florida State, South Carolina, Mississippi State, Vanderbilt, Chattanooga and Auburn should get them eight wins. That just requires them to go 2-2 against Tennessee, Georgia, LSU and Texas A&M to get to 10 wins. That is something this group is more than capable of. Those 10 wins should get them back to the College Football Playoff for the second straight season.
Texas A&M Under 8.5 Wins (-120)
My favorite win total bet in the conference is for Texas A&M to win under 8.5 games. Mike Elko is doing a great job building a winner in College Station. The Aggies seem set for the future with Elko at the helm and with the amount of money coming into the program. They won 11 games last year and made the College Football Playoff. However, they were beneficiaries of about as easy an SEC schedule as a team can have. Other than an excellent non-conference win against Notre Dame, there was no regular-season game for the Aggies to really hang their hat on. It’s hard to debate that the schedule wasn’t a factor in their success when Texas A&M lost its biggest regular-season game in the finale against Texas and then failed to score a touchdown in their College Football Playoff opening-round loss to Miami.
This year, the schedule gets much tougher for Mike Elko and the Aggies. Road trips to Missouri, LSU, Alabama, South Carolina and Oklahoma will all present their own challenges for Texas A&M. That is in addition to tough home games against Tennessee and Texas. Those are seven games that Texas A&M could lose, and they need to win four of the seven to get over this win total.
Texas A&M lost a lot of talent from last year, including leading receiver KC Concepcion and elite defensive players like Cashius Howell, Tyler Onyedim and Taurean York. There will be a much bigger burden on Marcel Reed to be elite for Texas A&M to win this year, and he still has a lot to prove as a passer, especially on the road in high-level SEC environments. It seems like there could be a bit of a step back this year for the Aggies, despite the great trajectory that Mike Elko has the program on.
