Despite Alabama football ending its non-conference schedule Saturday against Mercer, the Tide path to the SEC championship became much clearer.

Hate to answer a question with a question, but that query is worthy of another one in reply: What are we even doing here?

Much of the week has been spent pouring over SEC tiebreaker rules and trying to apply them to the season's remaining regular season games. Before Saturday's slate of games, one very realistic scenario had an eight-team first place SEC tie going down.