Eyebrows were raised when Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze suggested this week that college football teams should hold scrimmages against other college football teams.
This is not unheard of and some have suggested it before, but it’s the teams that Freeze mentioned that caught people’s attention.
“I’m going to cry again for the solution,” Freeze said. “The solution is: Allow us to scrimmage somebody on A-Day. Another team. I think everybody would get out of it exactly what they want. Let Alabama play Troy and we play UAB or vice versa.”
A lot of people may not know the history of UAB and Alabama, but UAB has been wanting for years to play Alabama in football and basketball and that only has happened once in either school’s history and that’s when the pair met in the NIT many moons ago with UAB winning.
The ironic thing is that UAB and Alabama play each other in other sports, but not the big two, so don’t hold your breath thinking this will happen anytime soon because, for the most part, Alabama is against it.
However, new UAB head coach Trent Dilfer is open to the idea of playing Auburn.
“Pretty. Pretty. Pretty please,” Dilfer said. “Yes, of course. He’s right. We all want, whether you’re Auburn or Alabama, you’re looking for live competition. You’re looking not to play yourself. If you’re UAB or Troy, you’re looking to play people perceived much better than you and you can use it as a test to see where your program is at.”
Now you have UAB and Auburn ready to do this, but we’ll have to wait and see if Alabama and Troy would be open to this idea too. Stay tuned.
{UAB Football}
About Stacey Mickles
Stacey is a 1995 graduate of the University of Alabama who has previously worked for other publications such as Sportskeeda and Saturday Down South.