Texas pushes back a football series with Ohio State to schedule one with Alabama

Alabama and Texas will play each other in football in 2022 and 2023, the programs announced Wednesday. They haven’t met since the 2009 season’s BCS Championship, which Alabama won by two touchdowns. They haven’t played each other in the regular season since 1922 — a full century between games.

Texas will host the first game, Bama the second. To make room for these games in ‘22 and ‘23, Texas and Ohio State have agreed to push back a scheduled home-and-home ‘22-’23 to ‘25-’26. Texas also scrapped a 2023 game against UCF. And in the most major news of all of this, Texas also says it will play UTEP in 2020.

The Longhorns are 7-1-1 in nine games against the Tide. Six meetings have come in bowls.

These games should be exciting, and they’re not that far off.

Alabama and Notre Dame recently unveiled a series that doesn’t start until 2028. College football teams regularly schedule a decade or more in advance, so announcing a series a mere for seasons ahead of time almost counts as short notice in this context.

Bama and Texas are two of the sport’s most historic programs. (Yes, one’s been drastically more successful in recent years and has a lot more national championships.)

Alabama has been a regular participant in high-profile non-conference games under Nick Saban, but the Tide have chosen to play a lot of those at neutral sites.

The sport’s wave of neutral-site games at massive NFL fields has its perks: big sponsorship money, a nice stadium, and nobody getting a real home-field advantage. But college football is a game best played on campus, and these meetings in Austin and Tuscaloosa will be more fun than if the two were playing at AT&T Stadium.