How About Them Apples: Will Rivalry Game Survive Beyond 2028?

The Huskies and Cougars have five years to show they care about this match-up.

Grady Gross celebrates kicking a game-winning field goal to decide the 2023 Apple Cup. / Joe Nicholson-Imagn Images

Five years ago, the COVID pandemic wiped out the Apple Cup, preventing Washington and Washington State from playing a football game against each other for the first time in three quarters of a century, since World War II prevented them from meeting in 1944.

Five years from now, no cross-state rivalry game is scheduled, and not necessarily because anyone fears another outbreak of germs or warfare.

The question is simply this: will anyone care?

"I don't know," Husky coach Jedd Fisch said candidly this week.

Texas and Texas A&M went different directions after 2011 -- after meeting on the football field 118 times -- when they split off into different conferences, with the latter heading for the SEC and leaving the Longhorns behind in the Big 12.

With both members of the SEC now, the Aggies and 'Horns will play in late November for the first time in a dozen years.

Meantime, Iowa and Iowa State continue to battle it out for state pride, while competing in different conferences. They've played every season since 1977, with the exception of the COVID interruption four years ago, because the game matters in Middle America.

However, Colorado and Nebraska met for 62 consecutive years through 2010, went their separate ways conference-wise, had a seven-year gap in the series and have now met four times in the past seven years in an effort to rekindle what they once had.

"I know it will depend on what everyone's appetite is to be able to schedule these games in the future," Fisch said.

Once the Pac-12 broke up, leaving WSU in and the UW out, the schools rushed to sign a five-year contract to preserve the rivalry through 2028, yet even that symbolic move showed how quickly college football trends and opinions can unravel.

Troy Dannen and Pat Chun sat down and negotiated the deal as the respective athletic directors on behalf of the Huskies and Cougars.

They hammered out a plan in which the teams would meet Saturday at Lumen Field, a neutral site, and then alternate the game on campus for the next four years, beginning in Pullman in 2025. After that, no promises.

Dannen was so passionate about all of this he quit after eight months on the job at the UW and moved to Nebraska to become its athletic director and Chun left WSU -- to replace Dannen in Montlake.

The Huskies celebrate a 2022 Apple Cup victory in Pullman. / James Snook-Imagn Images

Typically this game that's been played 115 times and has been called the Apple Cup since 1962 has been scheduled at the very end of the regular season, as sort of an exclamation mark for what's previously taken place, where it's often decided in challenging conditions and lately been drawing plenty of attention and national TV exposure.

Word has it ticket sales have been slow for this mild-weather, early-in-the-schedule, off-campus Apple Cup. Lumen Field seats 68,000-plus and projections have the gate falling maybe 10,000 to 15,000 short of that.

Ah, but the game has been badly neglected before and survived, with the Apple Cup trophy going missing for several years before it turned up in a thrift store, while everyone kept things going on the football field.

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