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Bye Week Misfortune Stll Lingers For Alabama; A Former Coach Helps Out
July 4, 2010
Bill Curry was Alabama's head football coach back in the late 80's. Curry had a winning record every year at Alabama, but never beat Auburn. His final year in 1989, he had his dream season at Alabama end in a disaster. Ranked #2 and undefeated, Alabama lost to Auburn in the first ever iron bowl in Auburn. After a broken window or two later, Curry stepped down as Alabama head coach.
Now it's 20 years later, and Curry has a new job. He has a brand new football team, in it's first year of existence. The Georgia State Panthers have Bill Curry as their head coach.
As most of you know by now Alabama's final 6 SEC opponents have bye weeks before playing Alabama. With the Alabama /Auburn game now on Friday after Thanksgiving, Bama will now get a little bit of relief. Without any or very little concern shown by SEC commish Mike Slive, Bill Curry agreed this week to move the Georgia State/ Alabama game to Thursday night.
Previously that game would have been the Saturday before the Iron Bowl. Now Alabama will have a normal practice week before Auburn, which should be just fine with Nick Saban.
This is huge for Alabama. Last year Alabama was in the same boat, when they played UT Chattanooga, then they had the short week to prepare for that close call at Auburn last season.
If the Auburn game was on Saturday, this would be no issue. Saban will now have a short week to prepare for Georgia State, but who cares. Now they will have some sense of normalcy before meeting arch-rival Auburn. And this is huge for Alabama facing a determined team almost every week. Any inch of relief will be taken gladly.
LSU has consistently been one of Alabama's toughest games over the last few years. Thankfully That's when Alabama has their bye week. And it will come at a time when Alabama has been through games at Arkansas, at Tennessee, at South Carolina, and the Tide will have played Penn. State & Florida in Tuscaloosa.
It has now been reported, that the Georgia State move will be the only relief for Alabama in the scheduling. My question is why Mike Slive has done nothing to give Alabama some relief.. Couldn't he have at least moved one single SEC game? Yes he could have very easily.
Hopefully Slive will step up and implement some new rules for the future. A few weeks ago at the SEC meetings Slive sort of mumbled something about it, but I still don't think anything is written in stone. Personally, I don't think he cares.
What do you think? Happy 4th of July!!