As spring football games around the country approach, here’s a helpful guide for knowing what your school can do to ensure it plays in this season’s College Football Playoff.

It's pretty simple, really.

1. Play in the SEC.

The Southeastern Conference is the most dominant league in the history of football. If you don’t believe that, the folks who support a team playing in it will tell you themselves. This is even true of poor, sad Vanderbilt fans who are fully aware that the last Commodore worth a damn was Lionel Richie.

SEC fans are quick to remind all of us they’ve had a representative in the College Football Playoff every year since its inception. My Oklahoma Sooners can’t say that. The Ohio State Buckeyes can’t say that. The New England Patriots can’t say that, either.

Come to think of it, neither can football teams Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich or Manchester United. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a group of fans with larger egos than Manchester United fans. Nobody from Manchester, England, ever poisoned landmark oak trees in Auburn, Alabama, though. That’d be a Crimson Tide fan.

Of course, these are facts that don’t have anything to do with the game of football—American or European—and are not taken into account when the College Football Playoff selection committee picks football’s final four. 

Playing in the SEC, though, certainly is. 

Alabama made it into last year’s College Football Playoff by having a better strength of record—which sounds like a Grammy Award category—than Ohio State. This leads me to the second item to mark off:

2. Schedule an FCS cupcake in November.

Alabama’s “strength of record” scratches the needle when you take a gander at the last team the Tide beat before being awarded a spot in the College Football Playoff. That team is Mercer. And I’m not talking about Roy D.—though the Tide did pour a 55-gallon drum of ass-whip all over a bunch of Bears who couldn’t rightly defend themselves.

Alabama destroyed Mercer 56 to goose egg in Tuscaloosa, AL, and then Tide fans said with a straight face that Mercer plays a caliber of football similar to a blue blood of the Football Subdivision. And perhaps it does! After all, the Bears scheduled Auburn in 2017, too. Or was it the other way around? 

Of course, it could be that Mercer is just throwing warm bodies on a football field to collect a $600,000 check, but who can tell with all those zeroes lined up in a row to warp our vision of college football purity?

This kind of soft, doughy scrumptious scheduling goes on all the time. But it takes a certain level of gall to do it just before Thanksgiving—and even more gall to prop the victory up as a legitimate, resume-building win after losing your division title to a team (Auburn) that would eventually lose the Peach Bowl to Central Florida. 

Oh, and that leads me to the last thing you need to accomplish if you want to gain entry into the College Football Playoff this year.

3. Don’t win the conference title.

It’s overrated.

It doesn’t matter.

It’s fool’s gold.

No college football team needs to be the best team in its league to be considered one of the best teams in the country anymore. Conferences, leagues, divisions—they don’t matter. We’re all just Notre Dame masquerading as equal members of a meritocracy. Alabama proved it when the Crimson Tide lost the Iron Bowl and then got a bye week, while Georgia, Clemson, and Oklahoma all played in and won conference title games to earn admittance into the playoff.

Alabama had it right all along. 

Not only do you not need to win the conference crown, but you also need to schedule a nobody in November. That wait you'll be rewarded for your complacency with an extra week of rest so you can blowout Clemson and then eke out a victory against a UGA team that had the audacity to play in December.

RJ Young is a former Oklahoma Sooners football and basketball beat writer, investigative journalist, essayist, novelist, and Ph.D student. His memoir "LET IT BANG" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) hits shelves and earbuds in October. His YouTube channel is fire if you're into storytelling and topics ranging from Baker Mayfield to The Rock's early wrestling career to this one time when a guy got a little too interested in RJ's "Black Panther" cup at a urinal inside of a movie theater.