Over the past few years in college football, it has grown increasingly popular to schedule home-and-home games rather than neutral-site games, which have become very common.

Alabama is one of the teams moving towards home-and-home rather than neutral-site games. Nick Saban believes that home-and-home games are an opportunity to not only play a quality opponent, but to do it in front of your home fans.

With a program like Alabama that consistently makes a bowl game, Saban believes the novelty of playing at a neutral site has worn off and fans would rather see tradition games being played.

“I think that one of the reasons that we did games away from home was — from a scheduling standpoint it was a way to get a quality opponent on the schedule early on, which I thought had a lot of benefit in terms of your team developing in the offseason looking forward to that game,” Saban said in his press conference Tuesday. “That Clemson game we had the second year we were here probably did a lot to ignite the program in a way. Then after you do that for a while you start having success and fans are going to playoff games and bowl games and different things, and they don’t have the same significance. Then to have more quality home games for the fans to see becomes a little bit more important. I think that’s, in a nutshell, why we transitioned back to this.”

Saban and the Crimson Tide will take on Texas this weekend in the second game of a home-and-home series. Last year, Alabama took the first game on the road. Now the Tide are looking for a second-straight win over the Longhorns on their home field.