These 4 future nonconference games are among the Mitten’s last Covid disruptions
Four future nonconference games on the books were originally meant to be played during the 2020 season that Covid disrupted.
At least four future non-conference football games for Michigan State and Eastern Michigan were originally set to be played during the 2020 season disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic.
As the pandemic shuttered notable portions of American life for what was, at that point, an indeterminate period of time early in 2020, the Big Ten eventually opted to play a conference-only football schedule and the MAC punted on playing fall sports entirely in 2020.
As such, nonconference games for that year were either cancelled (a pandemic certainly satisfies most force majeure clauses) or pushed off into the rather distant future, a future that has now started to arrive.
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Andrew Graham
Andrew Graham
Most of the games got moved at least a decade out, but one — Michigan State’s opener against Toledo this fall, which recently got announced for Friday, Sept. 5 — will be played this fall.
Michigan State will still pay out $1.35 million for that game for Toledo to visit Spartan Stadium. The Spartans also won’t face Toledo led by long-time and highly successful head coach Jason Candle, who left the Rockets to be the head coach at UConn after the 2025 season.
The longer-term scheduled game for Michigan State is a 2032 trip to Provo, Utah, to play at BYU. That game was originally slated for the fall of 2020, the return game from the 2016 BYU-MSU game at Spartan Stadium.
The deal for those games was originally signed in 2015, when BYU was independent. The Cougars are now part of the Big 12. The deal also calls for a $350,000 guarantee to be paid out for the visiting team, so the Spartans have that payday looming.
And with a 16-year gap between the first contest and the second contest in this series, it’s possible that a child of a player in the first game competes in the next one, however unlikely.
And the Spartans will certainly hope the 2032 showdown out west goes better than the 2016 matchup where Jamaal Williams and the Cougars ran wild late.
The other two games that got rescheduled as a result of Covid both involved Eastern Michigan.
The Eagles were set to play Army at West Point in 2020, part of a long-running series between the team, a game that has now been pushed to the 2030 season, set to be played at West Point.
Eastern Michigan was also supposed to play Coastal Carolina in 2020, and that game has been pushed off to 2030.
