The Ole Miss Rebels and USC Trojans have canceled their future football series, it was announced on Tuesday.
Speaking to reporters, Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter revealed the news about the series with the Trojans. At a fan event last week, Carter hinted that the series was likely to be canceled as the SEC looks at moving to a nine-game conference schedule in 2026.
“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.”
Ole Miss and USC signed the contract for their home-and-home football series back in 2020. The series was scheduled to begin at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, Calif., on Aug. 30, 2025 before concluding at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium in Oxford, Miss., on Sept. 19, 2026.
The 2025 matchup between the Rebels and Trojans would have marked their first-ever contest on the gridiron.
The SEC has long discussed moving to a nine-game conference schedule, and all indications point to the league making that change beginning with the 2026 season.
Earlier this year, Texas athletics director Chris Del Conte said that the league will likely move to nine games in 2026.
“We have eight games scheduled right now,” Del Conte told Inside Texas. “We’re working on going to a nine-game schedule, but we have a ways to go with that. I would say this year (2024) we have an eight-game schedule. The following year (2025), we have another eight-game schedule. Then we’ll look at going into a nine-game conference schedule.”
While a nine-game football schedule does have its advantages, such as conference members facing each other more often, it does create an imbalance of home and away games. Most power teams prefer to play seven home games each season, which means that they would need three non-conference home games in years when they play four SEC games at home and five on the road.
That could squelch some longstanding non-conference rivalry games and could also lessen the number of big time home-and-home series in future seasons.
The new 12-team College Football Playoff also plays a role in future scheduling. Rather than a tougher schedule, teams will likely prefer to have little to no losses to have a greater chance of making the new expanded field should they not finish as conference champions.
Football Schedules