I'm interested in the selections of 3 rivals
top teams gonna play top teams?
I suspect that the selections for the 3 rivals will do their best to preserve as many historic, traditional legacy rivalries as possible. That's good for the game but more importantly to the SEC and ESPN, it'll be good for ratings. The other 6+6 teams rotated every 2 and 4 years, will almost certainly capture a lot of top team matchups. It'll be pretty tough to "hide" them from another. If you stack one school's "other 6-team schedule" with the lowest tier teams for one cycle, then two years later the schedule would flip and be overloaded with too many top teams.
For Texas' 3 rivals, it should be pretty easy. The Horns have 3 historical rivals and all of them are now in the SEC. OU, A&M, and Arkansas. The SEC wants these games to be played.
For some other teams I think it gets trickier, but I won't pretend to know the intricacies of historical rivalries for legacy SEC teams.
Like, I can imagine Florida would want to play Georgia and Tennessee every year, but I don't know who a third would be.
And I can imagine that Georgia would want to play Florida and... Auburn every year? I think that's an old rivalry. But I don't know who a third would be.
Tennessee might have Florida and Vanderbilt and... Alabama?
Alabama would have Auburn and... Tennessee? And who else?
I don't know those old rivalries well enough to do anything other than speculate wildly.
