STARKVILLE — The Mississippi State and North Carolina State football programs have scheduled a home-and-home football series for 2020 and 2021.
MSU announced the scheduling agreement Tuesday. North Carolina State, which is in the Atlantic Coast Conference, will play host to MSU in September 2020. MSU, which is in the Southeastern Conference, will host the Wolfpack the following September.
“They’re a quality program,” MSU Director of Athletics Scott Stricklin said. “They’ve probably had some inconsistencies like us from time to time but the last time we played them was in a bowl game.”
The programs have met five times, the last being N.C. State’s 28-24 New Year’s Day win in the 1995 Peach Bowl. MSU played N.C. State in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1930 and 1940, while the Wolfpack traveled to Starkville in 1931.
The move is the latest in a series of scheduling announcements that has helped shape the future of college football.
In May, the SEC announced its non-division rotation through the 2025 season. This season, MSU will play host to Vanderbilt. Next season, it will play at Missouri. It will play South Carolina, at Georgia, Florida, at Tennessee, Missouri, at Vanderbilt, Georgia, at South Carolina, Tennessee, and at Florida in the following years.
In April, the SEC announced it will stay with an eight-game conference schedule. The move includes six games against division opponents and two from the other division, including one against a traditional rival.
The decision also featured a requirement that starting in 2016 all SEC teams will have to schedule at least one opponent from the ACC, Big 12 Conference, Big Ten Conference, or Pacific-12 Conference.
Last month, MSU announced a home-and-home series against Arizona. The teams will meet Sept. 10, 2022, at Arizona Stadium in Tucson, Arizona. The Wildcats will return the trip Sept. 9, 2023, in Davis Wade Stadium at Scott Field.
Stricklin said Tuesday that MSU is close to completing its schedules for 2018 and 2019 and that the schedules for 2016 and 2017 have been “a little more challenging” to complete given the amount of time schools schedule in advance. He added MSU’s 2015 schedule has been completed. He said the SEC likely will announce all of the schedules at the same time because several teams are still trying to move dates of games.
Stricklin said MSU put together a list of all of the schools in the other power conferences and broke it into three groups. He said MSU didn’t have much luck trying to schedule games against teams on two if the lists and has had “a lot of conversations” with schools that are on the third list. He said he hasn’t sensed a difference in the level of difficulty in scheduling games for 2016 and 2017, but he reiterated his desire to play seven home football games in talking about the possibility of playing a neutral-site game against a team from a power conference. MSU lost to Oklahoma State 21-3 on Aug. 31, 2013, in the Texas Kickoff at Reliant Stadium in Houston.
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