Ohio State and Georgia had agreed to a home-and-home to kick off the next decade. But with both teams' conferences going through major changes in scheduling, the Buckeyes backed out of that agreement Thursday with Georgia's blessing.
By
Jerry Hinnen
May 31, 2012 at 5:33 pm ET1 min read
Well, we hope nobody made travel plans they can't change.
Thursday's news that
Ohio State and Georgia won't play a home-and-home series as previously agreed would seem to be a disappointing blow to supporters of both the Buckeyes and Bulldogs--not to mention any
college football fan searching for that increasingly endangered species, the marquee nonconference matchup. But with the series set for the 2020 and 2021 seasons, no contract yet signed between the schools, and both teams looking at crowded future nonconference slates, its cancellation doesn't exactly come as a surprise.
“I’m not upset," Georgia athletic director Greg McGarity
told the Athens Banner-Herald. "The bottom line, they said they couldn’t play
."
The two schools signed a letter of understanding in December 2010, a little more than 12 months before the Big Ten and Pac-12
announced their annual nonconference scheduling agreement, due to kick off in 2017. That game plus the Buckeyes' eight league matchups already have their schedule at nine BCS opponents--and that's assuming the Big Ten doesn't renew its previous commitment to playing a ninth conference game.
The Bulldogs likewise have their annual rivalry game vs. Georgia Tech, eight SEC games, and a league that's already
squabbling over major scheduling issues that a ninth game
would go a long, long way towards solving.
Little wonder, then, that the two sides abandoned the series amicably, or that McGarity says he won't schedule a similar series until college football's expansion-induced scheduling upheaveal "settle(s) down."
But even if we can't say we're surprised or even disappointed (given how unlikely the games were to ever be played, especially once the Big Ten agreed to its Pac-12 deal) we can at least point out that the longer the arrangement
did stay on the books, the closer it came to becoming reality--and that it's still a shame it's come off of those books this quickly.