The Georgia Bulldogs have big plans on the books for a home-and-home series with UCLA, but conference realignment has left the series in doubt. Two months after first speaking on the series, Georgia athletic director Josh Brooks gave another update on Thursday.
Brooks told reporters after the Georgia Athletic Association board meeting that he did not have an update on the UCLA series. The series has come into question after UCLA moved to the Big Ten and after speculation about the SEC potentially expanding to a nine-game conference schedule.
“We’re still working through it,” Brooks said of the UCLA series. “I would hope to have an update on that soon.”
Brooks appeared on 92.9 The Game in March and spoke about the series, which would see Georgia play at UCLA in 2025 and the Bruins come to Sanford Stadium in 2026. Brooks did not commit to the series being played, explaining that different factors around the SEC and the Big Ten open the door for changes to be made by either team.
“With the evolution of the Big Ten schedule and our schedule, we’ve got to make decisions that are best for us and they’ve got to make decisions that are best for them,” Brooks said. “Everything is in play. We’ll see. It’s a fluid situation.”
The series between Georgia and UCLA was first announced in 2015, when the Bruins were still members of the Pac-12. UCLA, USC, Washington, and Oregon have made the move to the Big Ten and will play their first season as conference members this fall.
The Bulldogs and Bruins have only met twice before, the last meeting being a 19-8 victory for Georgia in Athens.
In terms of the SEC’s side of the equation, the situation that everyone around the SEC is monitoring is what the conference does in 2026. The conference recently announced it planned to stick with an eight-game schedule in 2025; a move to nine games in 2026 would mean one less non-conference game for all 16 members of the conference.
Georgia currently has four non-conference games scheduled for 2026: the home game against UCLA on Sept. 5, a home game against Western Kentucky on Sept. 12, a road game against Louisville on Sept. 19, and a home game against Georgia Tech on Nov. 28 for the regular season finale.
Kirby Smart was supportive of the SEC’s scheduling plan for 2025, specifically the fact that all teams will have the same conference opponents as they did for the 2024 season. Smart pointed out how difficult Georgia’s 2024 schedule is — specifically when it comes to a road schedule that includes at Alabama, at Texas, and at Ole Miss — and that having those road teams come to Athens will give Georgia fans an outstanding home slate for 2025.
As for the SEC’s scheduling plan beyond 2025, Smart wants to take a wait-and-see approach.
“Let’s see how things play out. Let’s see what the CFP becomes with how many teams are going to be in the playoff,” Smart said. “Does that designate us to go to nine [conference games]? Does television have something to do with that? There’s a lot of unanswered questions and to have a little bit of continuity in knowing what you’re going to get, I’m fine with that.”
Georgia is preparing to deliver a major upgrade to Stegeman Coliseum prior to the 2025-26 basketball season.
Georgia athletic director Josh Brooks spoke in depth on Thursday about the plan to install a roughly-6,000 square foot video board in Stegeman. The video board would be the largest video board on a college campus. Georgia’s video board would be roughly two-and-a-half times bigger than the video board at San Jose State, currently the largest video board on a college campus.
Brooks pointed out that the funding requests for the project is “in the works right now” as those involved look to finalize the latest Stegeman face-lift.
“It wasn’t just about making it the biggest. That organically happened,” Brooks said following Thursday’s athletic association board meeting. “It was really about using and utilizing that space. We would like to have started earlier, but the video board is going to require some HVAC components, some cooling. So we had to take a little bit more time to plan it. So the construction of that will begin next year, next spring.”
The video board will be located on the east wall where the band typically sits. The board would replace the center-hung scoreboard that has been in use since 2017.
Brooks explained that Georgia looked at the national landscape for different opportunities and ideas for the video board. Brooks said the goal was to make the most of the wall space on that side of the coliseum.
Brooks told the athletic board that he hoped this upgrade would “help change the narrative” around Stegeman Coliseum.
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