The 2021-22 UAB men’s basketball season schedule has been announced by head coach Andy Kennedy. The 31-game regular season schedule sees the Blazers playing eighteen Conference USA opponents and nineteen home games and is highlighted by a Dec. 18 matchup against West Virginia in Birmingham.
“We are excited about entering year two with a team, we believe, that has the opportunity to accomplish our mission of playing meaningful basketball deep into the month of March,” Kennedy said. “The challenges of our non-conference schedule will not only afford us early opportunities against quality opponents, but it will also prepare our team for the rigors of conference play.”
The Blazers will open play with an exhibition game versus AUM on Nov. 1 at Bartow Arena prior to the start of the regular season.
The Blazers will play at Bartow for much of the 13-game nonconference slate. The Blazers will play just four games outside of Birmingham – one at South Carolina on Nov. 18, one at Saint Louis on Dec. 4 and two games in the Las Vegas Classic over Thanksgiving weekend.
The trip to South Carolina will see Kennedy facing off against head coach Frank Martin, a former Kennedy assistant at Cincinnati.
The matchups for the Las Vegas Classic are yet to be announced but UAB is one of four participating teams in the tournament alongside New Mexico, San Francisco and Towson.
The most notable event of the nonconference schedule is Blazers’ matchup versus West Virginia on Dec. 18. The Mountaineers are led by head coach Bob Huggins who Kennedy served under as an assistant at Cincinnati from 2001-05. West Virginia will be the first Big 12 team to play in Bartow Arena since Oklahoma State in 2005.
Other conconference opponents include UNC-Asheville, Morehead State, Rhodes, Alabama A&M, East Tennessee State, Millsaps, Grambling and Mississippi Valley State all to be hosted in Birmingham.
For the Conference USA portion of the schedule, the conference will return to using travel partners for the 2021-22 season, marking a move away from last season’s COVID-necessitated back-to-back matchups.
UAB is notably set to play the other top finishers from Conference USA’s West division last season – Louisiana Tech and North Texas – twice. Other conference opponents include UTEP, UTSA, Rice, FIU, Florida Atlantic, Western Kentucky, Marshall, Southern Miss and Middle Tennessee.
The full schedule can be found on the UAB men’s basketball website.
