It’s not often he wakes up on this particular Sunday with clarity. And it wasn’t the way he woke up this year either. But the pool of SEC teams isn’t typically this small, Music City Bowl President Scott Ramsey told AL.com. So he woke up thinking about Auburn, and in a not-all-too-common occurrence, things went to plan.

Auburn was selected Sunday to play in the Music City Bowl against Maryland. It’s the culmination of a complicated process that turns weeks, months even, of preparation, projecting and watching games to all whittle down to a match between an SEC team and a Big Ten team.

The whole process of placing teams in bowl games is a sort of domino effect. It starts at the top with the four teams in the College Football Playoff ranking and trickles its way down through the New Year’s Six games and into the bowl ties of the tiers below.

The Music City Bowl is considered to be one of the SEC’s pool of six bowls, including itself, the Gator Bowl, the ReliaQuest Bowl, the Liberty Bowl, the Mayo Bowl or Vegas Bowl in alternating years and the Texas Bowl. Those six bowl committees work among themselves as well as in conjunction with the SEC and individual institutions to place teams in logical locations while avoiding certain factors including repeating a team in the same location to frequently or repeating a recent matchup or one upcoming in the immediate future.

In the SEC, teams are first put in the College Football Playoff if any are deemed worthy, then teams are placed in other New Year’s Six games. The Citrus Bowl gets the top pick of SEC teams after the New Year’s Six and then the pool of six get their turn. This year, with just nine bowl-eligible SEC teams, it did not seem likely the SEC would have enough teams to fill all of the six pool games after the Playoff, New Year’s Six and Citrus were all organized. That makes for day-of trading of spots among conference and bowl games.

But through the process, Ramsey said Auburn was always near the top of his list.

The day started for Ramsey arrived at his office around 10 a.m. after getting up early Sunday morning to drive back from Atlanta where he’d gone to the SEC Championship game.

There’s not much he can do in finalizing bowl selections until the New Year’s Six field is announced. Beside an office whiteboard full of hypothetical scenarios and which puzzle pieces fix together, Ramsey sat down to watch the selection show.

At 11:26 a.m., he watched Alabama be put in the Playoff over Florida State — a decision that does have, eventually, an impact on Ramsey’s process.

By 2 p.m., Ramsey got confirmation putting Florida State out of the top four and into the Orange Bowl pushed Louisville out of a potential New Year’s Six spot because of bowl tie-ins, and instead allowed for an SEC team, Ole Miss, to slide up into the Peach Bowl. Four of the nine bowl-eligible SEC teams had made a New Year’s Six spot: Alabama, Georgia, Missouri and Ole Miss.

Ramsey, and most bowl projections, expected Ole Miss to be the choice for the Citrus Bowl before Sunday. That meant other SEC teams would move up a spot and meant five SEC teams remained for the Citrus Bowl and the six pool games.

At 2:17 p.m., Tennessee announced it would get the Citrus Bowl spot.

Four teams — Auburn, Kentucky, LSU and Texas A&M — and six bowl spots remained. Finally, Ramsey could put the hypotheticals he’d drawn out into action.

“You’re trying to play jigsaw puzzle,” Ramsey said. “Obviously, you’re going to express your preference that year based on who you’ve had and all that kind of thing. So we felt we felt pretty confident on Auburn this year.”

This year, though, didn’t have many hypotheticals. Ramsey woke up Sunday morning knowing Alabama, Georgia, Missouri and likely Ole Miss were already ruled out. LSU was then likely for the ReliaQuest Bowl, Ramsey said.

Then, he had to sort through which remaining teams could be a fit. Kentucky played in the Music City Bowl last year and Tennessee played two years ago.

Texas A&M was the other possible option.

“A&M you felt like was a pretty good fit for Houston this year with the coaching change and staying close to home sometimes when that happens is preferable,” Ramsey said. “Wasn’t locked in but preferable.”

That left Auburn. It was one of the team’s Ramsey submitted to the SEC offices in the weeks leading up to selection day.

The SEC side of the bowl matchup was relatively easy from the process of elimination. The Big Ten side of the matchup was more difficult. Whereas the SEC works more with the schools and the bowls as a unit to place teams, the bowl gets much more say in picking their Big Ten team along with an ongoing contract with the Big Ten stating the bowl must take five different teams in six years.

Ramsey likes to treat the Big Ten pick and the SEC pick as two entirely different processes. And contractually, they largely are.

“You get a little you get a little cross-eyed by the time you’ve done that for six, seven days just to make sure you’re ready for Sunday,” Ramsey said. “I mean, you can’t start that process at two o’clock on Sunday and be ready to roll out all the information that you gotta be ready for in today’s world.”

What Ramsey wasn’t sure about entering the day is where the Music City Bowl would pick. Based on how New Year’s Six bowls played out, it was possible that the Big Ten would give up its spot in the ReliaQuest Bowl to a team like independent Notre Dame. That would have given the Music City Bowl the second choice of Big Ten teams with only the Citrus Bowl going ahead of them.

That hypothetical, though, did not happen. Wisconsin was put in the ReliaQuest Bowl against LSU and slotted the Music City Bowl another run down the pecking order. That’s how Maryland ended up being Auburn’s opponent instead of Wisconsin.

For all those hypotheticals, the Big Ten and the SEC avoided most of the chaos in the trickle-down from the Playoff. The ACC’s side of bowl selections lasted for hours into the evening after it entered a period of gridlock in reaction to Florida State falling out of the top four.

It created uncertainty in all bowls involving ACC teams and to an extent what other Power 5 teams might still be available as opponents for all the other bowls to consider.

Football’s selection Sunday is a complex, ever-changing and impossible-to-predict day of dealing and decisions made with fit and finance in mind. In the end, it’s all a marketing product made for fans and television.

So Ramsey sat back when it all settled, thankful his day, unlike so many others, actually went to plan.

“You want chalk,” Ramsey said. “If things get upset, it’s just a scramble. It may be for the better, sometimes. I say the better from a more unique matchup, a team that hadn’t been here. Maybe the team that your group wanted to select that particular year that you didn’t think you could and then they came. Hey, everything’s happened in the 26 years I’ve been here. We’ve had all kinds of crazy stuff at the last minute. For your stomach’s help, it’s a little bit easier if it’s not chaotic.”

Matt Cohen covers Auburn sports for AL.com. You can follow him on X at @Matt_Cohen_ or email him at [email protected]