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The final stretch of Vanderbilt football’s season begins this weekend at FirstBank Stadium, where the Commodores will take on No. 5 Alabama for their 10th game of the regular season.
The Commodores are coming off a win over Mississippi State on the road and are looking to pull off what would be another unforeseen upset over the Crimson Tide if they were to beat it again in Nashville.
But next week is Vanderbilt’s final road game of its regular season. Vanderbilt travels south to Gainesville for a matchup with the Florida Gators Nov. 21. When the schedule was originally released in the offseason, Vanderbilt knew it would play Florida in the first slate of games of the day.
Now it knows what time it will play Florida. Per the SEC’s announcement, the Commodores will kickoff against the Gators at 11 a.m. CT on Nov. 21 on either ABC, ESPN or SEC Network. The official channel will be announced following the games this weekend.
It will be the first time since the 2023 season that the two schools met. Florida leads the all-time series 44-11-2. The last time Vanderbilt won at Florida was during the 2013 season.
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Next week’s matchup will be the final game Vanderbilt plays in either the early or midday slates this season. The Commodores’ rivalry game against Tennessee during the final week of the regular season will take place sometime in the night slate of games.
But before Vanderbilt goes to Florida, it has an important game this weekend against an Alabama team that has high hopes of reaching the College Football Playoff. The Commodores got their first win of SEC play in Starkville while Alabama got a monumental road win at No. 14 LSU Saturday to stay firmly in the mix of the playoff race.
By now, everyone knows what happened the last time Vanderbilt hosted Alabama. The Commodores stunned a then-No. 1 Crimson Tide team that stained its resume and left Alabama as the first team out of the playoff during the 2024 season. For Vanderbilt, it was the biggest win in program history given the jolt of energy and momentum the team had the rest of the 2024 season and the entire 2025 season.
This year, the two teams will be meeting under almost identical circumstances. A Vanderbilt team that nobody has paid much attention to in the landscape of college football against a top five Alabama team that is coming off an emotional win for its resume.
Vanderbilt and Alabama kickoff at 11:45 a.m. CT on SEC Network Saturday.
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Graham Baakko is a writer for Vanderbilt Commodores On SI, primarily covering football, basketball and baseball. Graham is a recent graduate from the University of Alabama, where he wrote for The Crimson White, WVUA-FM, WVUA 23 as he covered a variety of Crimson Tide sports. He also covered South Carolina athletics as a sportswriting intern for GamecockCentral.
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