Ole Miss, BYU Cancel Future Home-and-Home Football Series

The Ole Miss Rebels and BYU Cougars will not play their previously scheduled home-and-home football series.

Sep 7, 2024; Oxford, Mississippi, USA; Mississippi Rebels helmet during warm ups prior to the game against the Middle Tennessee Blue Raiders at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Petre Thomas-Imagn Images / Petre Thomas-Imagn Images

The Ole Miss Rebels have lost a future non-conference opponent from their football schedule as the home-and-home series against the BYU Cougars will no longer be played in 2028 and 2029, according to an announcement this week.

Ole Miss and BYU originally announced the series in 2021, and the Cougars were going to host the first installment of the series in 2028 followed by the Rebels in 2029.

This is the second home-and-home non-conference series that has been canceled this year for Ole Miss, the first being one scheduled against the USC Trojans that was axed over the summer. The Rebels and Trojans were originally going to play in 2025 and 2026.

These cancelations likely boil down to the SEC looking at playing a nine-game conference schedule beginning in 2026. When Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter broke the news about the cancelation of the USC series this summer, he seemed to indicate that he expects a nine-game league slate in the near future.

"I think that's going to happen," Carter said. "I think you're seeing some of these more marquee matchups maybe coming off the books because of that. If you look at USC, they're going into the Big 10 and they're playing nine conference games now. I think that's probably in our future, too."

Another cancelation that recently impacted Ole Miss involved Wake Forest. Prior to the Rebels and Demon Deacons' matchup in Week 3, Ole Miss was informed that Wake would be canceling its return trip to Oxford in the home-and-home series, leading to some criticism from Rebels coach Lane Kiffin.

Had Ole Miss and BYU decided to play their series, it would have marked just the second and third times that the programs had ever met in football. The first meeting came in 2011 in Oxford, a game the Cougars won 14-13.