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ATHENS, Ga. —- Georgia will face Texas in Stegeman Coliseum as part of the 2019 SEC/Big 12 Challenge. The Bulldogs and Longhorns will play on Saturday, January 26. The 10 matchups for the one-day event were announced by ESPN on Thursday.
“We have great respect for Shaka Smart and the entire Texas program,” head coach Tom Crean said. “Bringing a program of that prestige to Georgia will be a tremendous challenge for us, and it will be a great opportunity for Bulldog Nation to help us meet that challenge head-on.”
Georgia is 7-5 all-time against Texas, including a 59-57 win two seasons ago in Athens as part of the challenge. Yante Maten led the Bulldogs with 21 points and seven rebounds. Georgia trailed by nine points at halftime before opening the second stanza with an 8-0 run. A J.J. Frazier three-point play with 7:14 put the Bulldogs up 46-44 and ignited another 8-0 surge that made it 51-44 just over a minute later. Texas rallied, however, and the victory wasn’t sealed until a Jarrett Allen jumper rimmed out as time expired.
The sixth-annual challenge features all 10 schools in the Big 12 featuring SEC counterparts. The SEC is coming off a 6-4 win in the 2018 Big 12/SEC Challenge after a 5-5 tie in 2017.
Each league hosts five contests, and all of the games will be televised on the ESPN family of networks. Four of the 10 games will be televised on ESPN, four on ESPN2 and two games will air on ESPNU. All 10 games will also be available on the ESPN app. ESPN’s College GameDay Covered by State Farm – the Saturday roadshow that discusses the top storylines of the college basketball season – will originate from one of the Challenge games. Tip times and network assignments will be announced at a later date.
“The Big 12/SEC Challenge is a unique opportunity to showcase our basketball programs,” said SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey. “Playing the event on a single-date in January puts our programs in the college basketball spotlight,”
The first two years of the challenge were played over several days in November and December, but the event has been consolidated to one single day in January since 2016. The four SEC teams not participating will play each other in conference games the same day. Georgia is 1-2 in previous appearances in the challenge. In addition to the victory over the Longhorns two seasons ago, the Bulldogs dropped road decisions at Baylor in 2016 and Kansas State in 2018.
The other matchups in the 2019 SEC/Big 12 Challenge will be: Alabama at Baylor, Arkansas at Texas Tech, Florida at TCU, Kansas at Kentucky, Iowa State at Ole Miss, South Carolina at Oklahoma State, West Virginia at Tennessee, Kansas State at Texas A&M and Vanderbilt at Oklahoma.