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USM's game at Alabama 'personal'
16 Eagles from Alabama out to prove their worth against Tide
By Tim Doherty
tdoherty@clarionledger.com
HATTIESBURG — For the 16 Southern Miss players who hail from cities and towns throughout the state of Alabama, Saturday's game with the Crimson Tide stands as one of the personal highlights of the Golden Eagles' football schedule.
"It's personal for the Alabama guys," said USM linebacker Michael Boley of Athens, Ala. "It's kind of like, 'I guess Alabama figured we weren't good enough to play for them, so let's show them."
But this year's game at Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa, Ala., appears to be the one of the last times USM takes on the Tide in the foreseeable future.
USM, which has played at Alabama annually for the past 12 years, has two games left on the current contract with the Tide.
According to the game contract obtained by The Clarion Ledger, the schools signed a six-year agreement on March 18, 2000. The final game was scheduled for October, 2005.
That game has since been changed to Sept. 10, 2005, a date appearing in the 2004 Alabama football media guide and confirmed by USM athletic director Richard Giannini.
"Yes, we have one more game," Giannini said of the 2005 game in Tuscaloosa. "That will bring the curtain down."
Giannini said he wouldn't rule out playing Alabama again, but that it had to fit within the parameters of USM's new scheduling philosophy: only one "money" game on the road per season, and some sort of reciprocated home game with Bowl Championship Series conference programs.
USM is scheduled to earn $475,000 this weekend and $500,000 in 2005.
And while that big pay day for taking its act on the road remains an essential piece of USM's scheduling policy, playing the Tide on an extended annual basis on Alabama soil with Southeastern Conference officials does not fit those parameters.
"We'll certainly look and see what we can do to get them in the mix, but our deal now is to play just one of those (guaranteed road gate) games," Giannini said. " ... We've talked, and they wouldn't consider a two-for-one deal. It was, 'You come here' and that was it.
"Well, our program has grown from that. We don't want to do that anymore."
And certainly Alabama doesn't want to cede its end of the deal, either.
An Alabama home game is a multi-million dollar event. A trip to USM's 33,000-seat Roberts Stadium — even if USM were paying a $500,000 guarantee like it did to Nebraska in 2003 — would represent not only a loss of home-field advantage but revenue as well.
Larry White, Alabama associate athletic director for communications, confirmed that the series had one more game to go beyond Saturday's showdown.
"We have Southern Miss on the schedule in 2005," White said Wednesday afternoon.
But the current contract allows for a $200,000 buyout, though Giannini said that wasn't likely.
In fact, USM had scheduled both Alabama and Auburn for 2005. But Giannini has been working with Auburn, not Alabama, to bump that game back to 2010.
And USM will continue to hit the road for unrequited pay days.
Giannini said contracts are already in hand with Florida (2006), Tennessee (2007) and Auburn (2008). In addition to moving the other Auburn date from 2005 to 2010, Giannini said a 2007 game with LSU is being bumped to 2009 or 2011.
"Playing Alabama certainly helps in our recruiting, but then so does playing Auburn, playing LSU, playing Georgia, playing Florida," Giannini said. "We want to play across the Southeast."
USM coach Jeff Bower said he has no problems seeing the series with the Tide continuing.
"I'm not sure what we have planned for the upcoming years," Bower said. "It's always a challenge to play Alabama.
"I don't know if the series will continue. It doesn't look like it."
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