Alabama has reportedly been searching high and low for opponents to add to their 2015 and 2016 football schedules, and now they may have found one.
Tom Groeschen of the Cincinnati Enquirer reported today that the Cincinnati Bearcats have had discussions with Alabama about playing some future football games.
Alabama is currently scheduled to open the 2015 season in Arlington against the Wisconsin Badgers. If the Tide were to play a “Nippert opener” in 2015, it would have to be the 2nd or 3rd week of the season.
But that doesn’t seem likely because it would leave Alabama with only six home games that season. Most SEC schools prefer to play seven homes games to rake in the additional revenue.
On the other side, Cincinnati already has four non-conference games set for 2015. In order to play Alabama in 2015, they would have to postpone or cancel one of those games.
In 2015, the Bearcats are slated to host Alabama A&M (Sept. 5) and Miami, FL (Oct. 3) and travel to Miami, OH (Sept. 19) and BYU (Oct. 24).
Cincinnati is scheduled to host BYU and Miami (OH) and travel to Purdue in 2016.
Alabama’s only other non-conference games currently scheduled are ULM (Sept. 26, 2015), Western Kentucky (Sept. 10, 2016), and Colorado State (2017).
Last month during the Spring meetings in Destin, Florida, Alabama head coach Nick Saban lamented on how hard college football scheduling is.
“We can’t just call people up and say we want to have a game,” Saban said. “It’s not like setting up a golf game. I call three of my buddies and say ‘You want to play Sunday morning. Can you play? Then everybody says yeah, I can play’
“You ever try to schedule a game? Do you know what goes into that? And it’s very difficult to do home and home with quality teams. And there’s only certain teams, to be honest with you, you almost have to buy games to get people to play you. Outside of the neutral site game we do and our conference games, we struggle to schedule three other games.”
Football Schedules