SEC vs. Big East Challenge: UGA vs. St. John's

The Lexington Herald-Leader (Ht - MemphisDog) gives us a heads up that UGA's participation in the 2009 SEC / Big East Challenge has been confirmed. The Georgia Bulldogs will face St. John's in Madison Square Garden on Dec. 9th. Our game will be the under card to the UConn vs. Kentucky game that will be part of the New York City double header.

The other double header site will be Tampa where UF will face Syracuse and DePaul will meet Mississippi State.

This is the third and final year of the current SEC/Big East/ESPN Contract. The format each year had included two double headers hosted in different cities. Birmingham ('07), Philadelphia ('07), Nashville ('08), and Cincy ('08). Eleven of the SEC schools participated with Arkansas somehow being left out and MSU participating twice.

I'm hoping that the series gets renewed, expanded and adjusted in the future to include more teams per year and a switch to home games instead of neutral site match-ups.

Georgia's known basketball schedule for 2009-2010 include:

Home:
Georgia Tech
Hawaii (tentative)

Away:
Missouri
Virginia Tech

Neutral:
Illinois (Gwinnett)
St. John's (NYC*)
Also a rumored pre-Coach Fox tourney in Hawaii.

PWD


*As correctly pointed out in the comments, this clearly isn't a neutral site game despite the intent of the Big East/SEC Challenge. However, the crowd won't look like a traditional SJU game.