Thanks to two meetings in the SEC Championship Game and one more in the College Football Playoff National Championship Game, Alabama and Georgia will be playing their sixth game against one another in the past 12 seasons when they meet on Sept. 19, an anomaly for two teams in different divisions of the SEC.
Alabama won all five. Another win in 2020 would tie UA with its longest winning streak against the Bulldogs in program history.
The countdown to kickoff starts with the USC game on Sept. 5, but UA won’t have to wait long after that for its first (and possibly most difficult) test of its SEC regular season schedule: hosting Georgia two weeks later. That game will be the 70th playing between the schools in a series that started in 1895.
UA and Georgia have been members of the same conference dating all the way back to 1895, when both were members of the now defunct Southern intercollegiate Athletic Association, before a stint in the Southern Conference from 1922-1932. The two schools have never gone more than seven seasons without a game between them.
By the time the two moved to become founding members of the SEC for the 1933 football season, they had played each other in Montgomery, Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, Atlanta and Columbus, Georgia, but never in Athens, Georgia. They played every year from 1922 to 1934 and all of them in the state of Alabama, the first two in Montgomery and the final eight in Birmingham. It wasn’t until 1935 that the two would meet in Athens.
Georgia’s best stretch in the series was the 1910s, when the Bulldogs won five of the six games, the five wins coming consecutively with a combined final score of 69-12. That streak remains Georgia’s best; since then, the Bulldogs have only exceeded two straight wins against UA once, a three-game streak from 2002-2007.
Since the end of that five-game streak by Georgia in the 1910s, UA has gone 37-18-1 against the Bulldogs, including the active five-game winning streak, other five-game streaks from 1922-1926 and 1960-1964 and the record six-game streak from 1949-1954. Included in the most recent streak are both of the meetings in the SEC Championship Game, won by eerily similar scores of 32-28 in 2012 and 35-28 in 2018.
It has been 12 years since the schools played in Bryant-Denny Stadium, but the recent history of the two playing in Tuscaloosa features thrilling games. Each of the last three games in Tuscaloosa were decided by one possession, most recently a 26-23 game in overtime won on a touchdown pass from Matthew Stafford.
In 2002, with Brodie Croyle starting at quarterback for an injured Tyler Watts, Alabama used a fourth-quarter pick-6 from Charlie Peprah to take the lead, just to lose on a game-winning field goal from Billy Bennett. Michael Proctor was the hero in 1994, making a game-winning field goal after Jay Barker threw for 394 yards and two touchdowns.
Reach Brett Hudson at 205-722-0196 or bhudson@tuscaloosanews.com or via Twitter, @Brett_Hudson
