Nick Saban, Greg Byrne meet to discuss home-and-home series

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TUSCALOOSA, Ala. -- The last time Alabama played a non-conference foe outside of a neutral site was in 2011 when it traveled to Penn State in Game 2 of a home-and-home series.

During his weekly radio show Thursday night, Crimson Tide head coach Nick Saban said he would be in favor of reverting back to that model again in the future and that discussions to do that have actually been held between he and athletic director Greg Byrne.

“I would like to do that,” Saban said at Baumhower’s Victory Grille. “We played Penn State home-and-home when I was here, and it was a good game here, it was a good game there, great crowd and all that. It’s better for our fans if we play at home, I get that. But playing in these sort of games has helped us to play a better team, even though it’s at a neutral site, and it gained tremendous exposure for the program early on.

“But Greg Byrne and I met about doing this in the future where we have some home-and-homes with some teams every now and then so we’re not playing in one of these neutral-site games to start the season.”

The neutral-site games aren’t going away, though.

They simply bring in too much money to both programs involved. Alabama received $5 million for its 2017 opener against Florida State in Atlanta’s brand-new Mercedes-Benz Stadium three weeks ago and will earn $4.5 million for playing Duke inside the same venue to start the 2019 season, according to a report Chandler Rome of The Anniston Star.

The Crimson Tide has also seen quite a bit of success in neutral-site games. Alabama is 8-0 in neutral-site openers under Saban and have three more scheduled the next four years.

But in terms of catering to fans of the program and increasing the level of competition and parity in college football, Saban is open to discussing future home-and-home series, on top of strengthening the schedule with more intriguing matchups nationwide.

“No question, I’d love to do it,” Saban said. “I’ve been out there talking about how we should have to play all Power 5 conferences in all 12 games. And I know there’s a lot of opposition to that. The biggest opposition is the way you qualify for a bowl game.

“Everybody wants to win six games, aight. So, they win six games, they get to go to a bowl game. Well, if I could play four teams that I know I could beat that nobody really cares about watching, then I could qualify for a bowl game.

“Well, my answer to that would be why don’t we do it like they do basketball? They pick 64 teams or 68 teams or whatever it is for the basketball tournament based on, not their record necessarily, but strength of schedule and all that type of stuff. So, you put the best teams, however many there are -- kind of like we do the top 12 now -- and then it wouldn’t be as big an issue to try to win six games but it would be more about who you play, strength of schedule, be much better for the fans.

“… And the other thing is is we wouldn’t be caught up in this deal that we have now in college football where if you lose one game, you may be out. Well, if everybody played 12 teams, it’s like the NFL. The New York Giants lost six games and won the Super Bowl a couple years ago. So, you can lose a game, you can lose maybe two games, and still be one of the best teams in the country, if you lost to one of the top-five teams or you lost to somebody else.

“I guess being an old NFL guy and playing nothing but NFL teams -- and they’re all good -- why don’t we do that more like that in college football?”

SABAN'S THOUGHTS ON PLAYING 9-10 SEC GAMES:

“I’ve always said nine games,” Saban said. “I just think that every player should have the opportunity to play every school in the SEC in his career. So, when we play our sixth game on the other side and two more, that usually happened in a player’s career. They got to play Georgia, they got to play Florida, they got to play everybody in the league. That doesn’t always happen now.”

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