Bowl games are officiated by neutral crews. What does that mean? Let me give you an example. Let’s say that an SEC school is playing a Big 12 school in the Sugar Bowl. The officials we be from a different conference than either one of those schools. Being that it is a New Year’s Day 6 bowl, it will most likely be officiated by a crew of officials from another Power 5 conference. In this case, let’s go with the ACC working the game.
How many bowl games will a conference have the opportunity to provide officials? The rule of thumb is this, they’ll provide half the number of officiating crews for the number of teams that will be playing in bowls. For instance, if the SEC has 10 teams playing in bowls, then they would send 4 or 5 officiating crews to work bowls.
So which bowls will they work? Bowls are usually separated into three tiers. There’s the Football Playoff and National Championship games, New Year’s Day Six bowls, and all the rest,
It’s up to the conference’s coordinator of football officials to assign individual officials to specific bowl games. Typically, he will assign the officials based on the level of the bowl game. The top ranked officials, based on their evaluations throughout the year, will be assigned to the higher-level bowls. The next group of ranked officials will work the next highest-level bowl. And so forth and so on.
The SEC Championship game is typically assigned to the top ranked crew over the previous season. There are some exceptions though. I was pulled from two SEC Championship games because Georgia was one of the teams in the game. The conference made the decision to eliminate any official from working the game that resided in the same state that a team was located.