After South Carolina had an unexpected cancelation in its non-conference schedule, Mark Kingston was in the process of lining up a series with Texas and sent Ray Tanner a text message.

“Fortune favors the bold.”

Tanner agreed, and soon after the Gamecocks and Longhorns were set for one of college baseball’s marquee early season matchups.

“I think it’ll be great for a sport as a whole. It’s a redo of 2002 and I think that’s a really cool think. I’ve already texted to Drew Meyer and texted a couple other guys asking if they want another shot,” Kingston said. “I think it’s a good way to tie the past history with the present and future. It’s a very important series and matchup in our history because it was a national championship matchup. That really attracted me.”

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The only other times the two programs met was in Omaha for the College World Series, and twice with a national championship on the line in 1975 and most recently in 2002.

Now, almost 20 years later the two are scheduled to meet for a home-and-home with a series in Columbia next year.

History aside, this is a matchup of two preseason top 20 teams with Texas No. 12 in Baseball America’s top 25 followed by South Carolina at No. 18.

“It’s an opportunity to show our team we believe in them and want to take them out on the road and play against the best. That’s where we want to be and where I think we’re moving. There are so many positives to it,” Kingston said. “For a lot of reasons it’s going to be a great series for us, them and college baseball.”

Regardless of if the Gamecocks win the series or not, they’ll get a favorable boost in the RPI—the metric heavily used in the NCAA Tournament selection process—and it will be even better if South Carolina takes two out of three on the road.

“From an RPI standpoint, obviously it will be a tremendous RPI boost going on the road to play an opponent like that,” Kingston said. “There were too many reasons why, when we looked into it and the opportunity presented itself we thought, ‘You know what? We’re going to go after it.’”

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The last time these two programs played was in 2002 for the national championship, the final year of a single-elimination title game, with Texas ultimately winning 12-6.

Kingston joked he didn’t want to give the Longhorns any bulletin board material when asked if it was a three-game series but said it would be a great three-game set if there was one.

“Both sides had really, really good players back then,” he said. “It would have made it more interesting.”