It's about damn time!
That's my first thought yesterday when the University of Wisconsin announced a home-and-home football series with the Crimson Tide of Alabama, set for 2024 and 2025.
Seems like forever since an SEC team visited Madison's Camp Randall. Well, not quite forever -- just since 1971 when LSU's Tigers came to town and won 38-28, then repeated that in 1972 at Baton Rouge.
Granted, the Badgers have played a couple games against SEC foes in recent memory -- against Alabama in 2015 and LSU in 2016 -- but both were those pesky "neutral sight" games. Alabama hosted at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas and Wisconsin hosted at Green Bay's Lambeau Field. And Bucky will face Notre Dame in neutral sight games in 2020 (Lambeau Field) and 2021 (Soldier Field in Chicago).
So what's my point? That getting the Crimson Tide in a campus setting is HUGE! It's great for college football, and even more so for the home town fans. Most SEC teams just will not play non-conference games north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Granted, getting schedules to match up is hard. To book Alabama, for example, the Badgers shifted a home-and-home with Virginia Tech to 2031 and 2032. Seems a little odd, I'm sure, but that's a long way off. Other similar foes are Washington State (2022, 2023), Pittsburgh (2026, 2027) and UCLA (2029, 2030).
But going along with that is one question -- Will those teams be any good when Wisconsin plays them? And how good will the Badgers be? You hope that all involved will be competitive, but the fact remains it's a crap shoot.
I will go out on a limb here and state that Alabama will definitely be competitive. Will the Badgers be up to the task? We'll have to wait and see.
We do, after all, have the 2019 season to worry about first! More on that down the road.
