For the sixth straight season and the 15th time in the last 16 seasons, Illinois will open its season at Gies Memorial Stadium after securing a one-time buy game with Alabama-Birmingham.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The 2026 football schedule for Illinois is now complete.

The Illini will host the University of Alabama at Birmingham in a nonconference matchup to open its 2026 season on Sept. 5. This non-conference single-game contract is the replacement game for Illinois and Missouri electing to not play its previously slated 2026 matchup.

This will be the first football matchup between the two schools and UAB's first contest against a Big Ten Conference opponent since 2012 when they were defeated by Ohio State 29-15. It will be just the fifth time UAB has ever played a team from the Big Ten.

The interesting element of this 2026 season-opening matchup is UAB terminated head coach Trent Dilfer after he produced a 9-21 record in two-plus seasons leading the Blazers program and the Blazers administration obviously has yet to name a permanent replacement for the recently open position. Therefore, whoever is hired by UAB this winter as its new head coach will be making his debut with the Blazers program in Champaign while Bielema is slated to begin his sixth season leading the Illini program.

In his summer media roundtable on June 27, Illinois athletics director Josh Whitman said what it was “a mutual decision” between Illinois and Missouri to remove the 2026 game from their schedules was a desire to subtract one power conference opponent from each of their slates. Illinois was slated to host both Missouri and Duke in its 2026 schedule along with having a home game against Southern Illinois. With the Big Ten Conference continuing with its nine-game league schedule, Illinois was then slated to play 11 power conference opponents in the 2026 season.

“Nobody is playing 11 power conference games on their schedule in this day and age so we wanted to make sure we were being fair to the program,” Whitman said in June from inside the Bielfeldt Building.

As IlliniGuys.com previously reported, the now six-game series between Illinois and Missouri that will be formatted as two three-game series (2027-29 and 2033-35) with two total games in Champaign, two totals games in Columbia, Missouri and two total games at a neutral site still to be determined.

Illinois will still have a seven-game home schedule for Illini season ticket holders that is slated to include this season-opener against UAB along with home games scheduled against Southern Illinois, Duke (which is the Blue Devils program’s first trip to Champaign-Urbana since 1965), Iowa, Nebraska, Purdue and Oregon (Ducks first trip to C-U since 1993).

Whitman and Bielema navigated a very slim pool of possible opponents as only 11 Group of Five Conference programs had an opening on its 2026 non-conference slate without a single game already signed against a power conference program. This list included Florida International, Florida Atlantic, Rice, Alabama-Birmingham, South Florida, Louisiana Tech, New Mexico State, Kent State, Ohio, Georgia State and Louisiana.

IlliniGuys.com will be submitting a Freedom of Information Act request for the game contract with Alabama-Birmingham that will include the amount of the single-game payment from Illinois.

The Big Ten Conference previously announced that Illinois would host Iowa, Nebraska, Oregon, and Purdue in 2026, with road trips scheduled to Maryland, Michigan State, Northwestern, Ohio State, and UCLA.

Illinois has won its last 19 season-opening games inside Gies Memorial Stadium with the last loss being a 24-7 defeat to the University of Southern Mississippi to open the 1997 season in the first game of the Ron Turner era. Illinois Illinois will opens the season in Champaign for the sixth straight season and the 15th time in the last 16 seasons (2020 season opener at Wisconsin).