Alabama Basketball finalizes series with Arizona

Earlier this week, Alabama Basketball finalized a series with the Arizona Wildcats for the 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons. Bama will play the Wildcats on December 20th of next basketball season in Phoenix, Arizona, before Arizona makes a trip to Birmingham the following year.

This series further contributes to the growing national relevance of Alabama Basketball, which has gained lots of respect under Coach Nate Oats. Under Oats, and particularly in the last two years, Bama has played several marquee regular season non-conference games against high-caliber opponents.

The Crimson Tide played a similar series with Gonzaga in 2021-22 and 2022-23, playing “neutral site” games in each other’s backyards. Bama split these games, beating Gonzaga in Seattle before falling to the Zags in Birmingham.

In that same time period, it played home-and-homes with Memphis and Houston. It split with Memphis and swept Houston, which has been a top-5 program in the sport over the last few seasons.

It has also played in several in-season tournaments and MTEs, facing opponents such as Miami, Providence, Michigan State, UConn, and North Carolina (twice). Alabama went 4-2 in these matchups.

In addition to playing big brand names, Coach Oats has regularly scheduled dangerous mid-major teams like Iona, Belmont, Liberty, Louisiana Tech, South Dakota State (twice), Davidson, Stephen F. Austin, and Furman (twice). These games have actually given Bama more problems than the high-major opponents.

Alabama Basketball last played Arizona in a home-and-home series in 2017-18 and 2018-19, splitting the series 1-1. The upcoming series will feature two of the better programs in college basketball today.

Alabama has won the SEC regular season and tournament championship in two of the last three years. It earned a top-2 seed in the NCAA Tournament and reached the Sweet 16 in both 2020-21 and 2022-23.

Despite losing to 15-seed Princeton in the first round of the 2023 tournament, Arizona was one of the best teams in the country throughout the 2022-23 season. It finished with a 28-7 record and won the PAC-12 conference tournament.

This was just a year after it earned a no. 1 seed in head coach Tommy Lloyd’s first season at the helm. The Wildcats went 33-4 in 2021-22, won the PAC-12 regular season and tournament title, and reached the Sweet 16. It lost three upperclassmen to the NBA Draft following this season, and yet experienced only a minor drop-off.

The matchup between Alabama Basketball and Arizona should be one of the more entertaining non-conference games next winter.