Why Alabama plays neutral-site games every year (and may play fewer soon)

Alabama starts its football season with a game against Louisville in Week 1. Like every other Tide season-opener in the last half-decade, the game won’t happen on a campus.

The game against Louisville at Orlando’s Camping World Stadium will be Bama’s eighth neutral-site opener in 12 years under Nick Saban and sixth in a row. The sport’s best team starting the year in a glitzy stadium against a Power 5 foe has become as much a fixture of Week 1 as anything else. And the Tide have won all of them so far, five times in Atlanta and three more times in Arlington, Texas. They beat Florida State in a No. 1-vs.-3 game in 2017.

There’s a method to Bama’s decision to play netural-siters so often.

Even at its easiest, college football scheduling is a game of musical chairs with tons of money and ego involved. Alabama has to find four willing non-conference opponents every year. Three are usually mid-majors or FCS teams who don’t mind accepting a fat paycheck from the Tide in exchange for traveling to Tuscaloosa and getting destroyed. Those teams get much-needed budgetary help and maybe a little recruiting bounce, too.

But the Tide have preferred to play at least one Power 5 team a year outside the SEC. Aside from a two-game series with Penn State in 2010 and ‘11, they haven’t found dance partners for on-campus series. Power 5 athletic directors probably don’t want to subject themselves to playing Bama twice, because they’re realistic about what Bama will do to their teams. And teams from the power leagues don’t often agree to road games without a home game.

So, Alabama’s turned to one-offs at neutral sites.

“I think the philosophy has always been that we want to add at least one quality opponent to our schedule, and other than the Penn State home-and-home since I’ve been here, we’ve never been able to get that worked out like we want to,” Saban said in the spring of 2018.

When teams play a two-game home-and-home, the money tends to work out at least in the ballpark of even. One team might get more attendance and sell more food and merchandise, but the guarantee amounts are similar. The home team might pay the visitor $500,000 each year, and everyone’s marginal profit depends on other revenue sources. (There are times when guarantee amounts differ by a lot.)

At a neutral site, Alabama isn’t responsible for paying game-day staff members. Stadium security is provided for it. The Tide have to get themselves to a different city and get hotel rooms, but their costs are a drop in the bucket of what game organizers pay them.

The Tide usually get between $4 million and $6 million to play these games. They’ll get a combined $14 million in payouts for this one, a 2019 game against Duke, and a 2021 game against Miami, the latter two happening at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium. They just put another game on the books in Arlington in 2020 against USC, for a reported $6 million more.

That’s much more per game than Alabama could ever hope to get out of a standard home-and-home with anybody. The Tide play their other three non-conference games at home, so they still get to play seven games a year in Tuscaloosa. They get to skip a harder road environment.

They still have the three neutral-siters on future schedules through 2021 against Duke (LOL), Miami, and USC. But the Tide have been on a shopping spree for more standard home-and-homes, and they’ve found a few marquee opponents who don’t mind playing them twice:

“Neutral-site games really launched our program in Alabama when we first came there years ago,” Saban told reporters at the SEC’s media days in July ‘18. “But I think philosophically we’re sort of changing our thoughts on that and our future scheduling and trying to get more home-and-homes.”

Only a few power programs would be willing to play the Tide in back-to-back years. Even fewer, probably, would be worth Alabama’s time to visit. The College Football Playoff has been iffy about really rewarding schedule strength, and Bama isn’t going to subject itself to a dangerous game that wouldn’t also be a huge resume-builder to win.

The Tide might be also trying to protect themselves against future drops in attendance. They still turn out fans in droves to Bryant-Denny Stadium (more than 101,000 per game in 2017, per the NCAA), but average FBS home attendance nationwide dipped heavily in ‘17 and has gone down every year since 2013. Alabama won’t be the best forever, and the Tide might find that hosting Notre Dame in 11 years offers a nice attendance bump.

The Tide aren’t ditching neutral-site games. But if enough blue-bloods are willing to face them twice, we’ll get to watch more huge games on raucous campuses.