Alabama's Nick Saban says SEC championship is essentially a College Football Playoff game

Nick Saban has plenty of postseason experience with the Alabama Crimson Tide. The coaching legend has made the College Football Playoff seven times and accumulated a 6-1 record in the semifinals and a 3-3 record in championships.

During his appearance on "The Pat McAfee Show" on Thursday, however, Saban said the postseason begins for the Crimson Tide even before the four-team field squares off, in the SEC championship game.

"If you went back and you looked at all the years that we played in the SEC championship game, maybe minus one, it was a playoff game. It was a playoff game," Saban told McAfee. "I remember we played Georgia [in 2012], and barely won. They had the ball on the 8-yard line ready to score at the end of the game when the clock ran out. I think the score was 28-24 or something (editor's note: it was 32-28).

"We played Notre Dame [in the BCS championship game] and it was 28-0 at halftime. That was in the national championship game."

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Concluded Saban:

"But if you look at it, most of the time you play in the SEC championship game, you're playing a playoff game," Saban said. "And if you lose that game and you have a loss. You're not getting in. So, it is what it is."

That's especially true for Alabama this season: With its loss to Texas early in the year, the Crimson Tide is a loss away from having an extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, playoff path. A two-loss team is yet to make the CFP, so there's minimal room for error even if the team makes the SEC championship.

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Looking beyond Alabama, the Pac-12 likely having a representative and the Big Ten potentially hurtling towards having two again make the path for Saban's team even harder. There's a lot of season left and nothing is set in stone, but no one knows the stakes more than Saban.

Since the inception of the CFP in 2014, Alabama has made the SEC tutle game in Atlanta six times. Saban did not lose any of those games, which has all but guaranteed access to the CFP to the winner. Indeed, the SEC champion winner has made it into every CFP to date. The SEC has sent two teams to the playoffs twice: 2017, when one-loss Alabama made it in despite not playing in the conference championship, and 2021, the year Alabama beat Georgia in the conference championship (Georgia would go on to win the national title).

Even so, the weight of that game is in no way diminished. The SEC winner has gone on to be the No. 1 team in the CFP semifinals seven times, with only Clemson getting that spot outside of the conference.

Alabama is 7-1 (5-0 SEC) this year with a game against No. 15 LSU looming in Week 10. If it does make the SEC championship, it would likely be against Georgia, as underdogs. That would be unfamiliar territory for Alabama but knowing Saban, he would embrace it all the same.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Alabama's Nick Saban on SEC championship: 'You're playing a playoff game'