UGA faces Alabama in first game without Felton

Athens — Georgia and Alabama will meet Saturday in a basketball game perhaps most notable for who won’t be there: the teams’ head coaches of a few days ago.

Alabama sought and received Mark Gottfried’s resignation on Monday. Georgia fired Dennis Felton on Thursday. And that leads to this rare spectacle: a major-college game between two teams with interim head coaches.

“Very ironic,” Georgia guard Corey Butler said Friday. “Quite odd, actually.”

Tonight’s game in Tuscaloosa will be Georgia’s first under Pete Herrmann, a longtime Felton assistant, and Alabama’s second under Philip Pearson, a longtime Gottfried assistant.

Call it the Battle of the Interims.

Or maybe the Empathy Bowl.

“We know what they’re going through,” said Georgia guard Zac Swansey, referring to the Alabama players. “They’re going through the same thing we are.”

Herrmann, in his 29th season as an NCAA Division I coach, was asked if he could recall a game between two teams with interim coaches.

He couldn’t.

“I really don’t know,” he said, “if that has ever been the case.”

Neither the SEC nor the NCAA keeps records on such trivia.

In its first game post-Gottfried, Alabama lost 89-80 at Arkansas on Thursday. That dropped the Crimson Tide to 12-8 for the season, 2-4 in the SEC.

In its first game post-Felton, Georgia will be trying to halt a seven-game losing streak that has dropped its record to 9-11, 0-5 in the SEC.

Butler, a Georgia co-captain, said the team realizes there’s no time to dwell on the coaching change.

“The season is going to continue with or without us,” he said, “so we might as well take part in it.”

Herrmann, 60, has said he takes no joy in the role of interim coach “because of the circumstances,” but players say he continues to exude energy on the practice court.

“If our guys played with as much energy as Coach Herrmann has,” Butler said, “we’d probably be undefeated.”

Herrmann said that in preparing for tonight’s game, he’s stressing the same things Felton would — rebounding, defending, sharing the ball and, especially, cutting down on turnovers.

Georgia had 17 turnovers in what turned out to be Felton’s finale, a 26-point loss at Florida on Wednesday night.

“As I’ve told a couple of the players,” Herrmann said before practice Friday, “I’m not going to be after you about things we’ve been after you about for three months now. You have to start to grow and mature in that regard.

“And they were very good; they were very accepting.”

Tonight’s game might not be the only imminent competition between Georgia and Alabama. With both programs in the market for new coaches, they could be interested in some of the same candidates. And that raised the question of whether the timing of Felton’s firing — three days after Gottfried’s ouster — was partly precipitated by fear of falling behind in the competition for a coach.

“No, Alabama didn’t factor in,” Georgia athletics director Damon Evans said. “Each institution has to do what they think is best. We made a decision that is best for Georgia.”

Both schools made essentially the same decision this week, setting up the Battle of the Interims.