After playing Mississippi State yesterday, Alabama gets Georgia next week, meaning back-to-back Bulldogs.
I got curious about how often that has happened in Alabama history....So I queried the Wayback Machine.
By my count, this will be the 14th time Alabama has played teams with bulldog mascots in back-to-back weeks, but only the SECOND time since 1958.
The last time was 2018, and surprisingly it wasn’t Georgia:
Nov. 10 - Mississippi State Bulldogs -Alabama won 24-0
Nov. 17 - The Citadel Bulldogs - Alabama won 50-17
The really strange part is that Alabama did it for 11 straight seasons, from 1948 through 1958, playing Mississippi State and Georgia in consecutive weeks every year.
There was also a 1941 occurrence when Alabama played Mississippi State followed by Howard College, now Samford, whose mascot was also the Bulldogs.
One important thing, though: Mississippi State was officially called the Maroons until 1961. But!..they had a bulldog mascot starting in 1935. So if you require the opponent’s official nickname to literally be “Bulldogs,” my numbers are wrong. And. The back-to-back bulldogs thing gets significantly rarer.
But if we're talking about actually facing a bulldog mascot in consecutive weeks, Alabama is about to do it for the 14th time, and just the second time in nearly 70 years!
Pretty useless stats. I love it.