  The determination of the ordering of the neutrino masses (the hierarchy) is
probably a crucial prerequisite to understand the origin of lepton masses and
mixings and to establish their relationship to the analogous properties in the
quark sector. Here, we follow an alternative strategy to the usual
neutrino--antineutrino comparison in long baseline neutrino oscillation
experiments: we exploit the combination of the neutrino-only data from the NOvA
and the T2K experiments by performing these two off-axis experiments at
different distances but at the same $<E >/L$, where $<E >$ is the mean neutrino
energy and $L$ is the baseline. This would require a minor adjustment to the
proposed off-axis angle for one or both of the proposed experiments.
