Wake Forest replaces canceled trip to Ole Miss with home-and-home series vs. Oregon State

Wake Forest has announced future football games against Oregon State, with the series starting next year to replace a trip to Mississippi after a cancellation that drew the ire of Rebels coach Lane Kiffin.

Wake Forest announced the series with the Beavers on Wednesday morning. It has the Demon Deacons going west to visit Corvallis in 2025, while the Beavers will return the trip to Winston-Salem in 2029, or earlier.

Wake Forest said it will honor terms of its original contract with Ole Miss, which dates to 2014. The school didn't specify how much it must pay to buy out of that game.

"We are committed to making decisions that best serve our program and our student-athletes, and that includes bringing national games to Winston-Salem,” athletics director John Currie said in a statement.

“We have a high degree of respect for Ole Miss and their fans, and we congratulate them on their victory last weekend in sold-out Allegacy Stadium. But given the ongoing financial pressures of the new era of college athletics and our priority on continuing to grow resources to benefit our student-athletes, it was the right business decision to secure this two-game home-and-home series with Oregon State, and cancel the planned game in Oxford next year.”

The fifth-ranked Rebels beat the Demon Deacons 40-6 on Saturday on the road, with Kiffin saying afterward that Wake Forest had already informed Ole Miss that it wouldn't make the return trip next year. He was still unhappy about it two days later at his weekly press conference, saying Wake Forest had violated “an unwritten rule” and expressing frustration that the school had to search for a replacement game.

“It obviously wasn't appreciated very much, them putting us in that situation,” Kiffin said.

Oregon State joins Washington State as two holdovers from the Pac-12, which saw most of its membership scatter this year to the Atlantic Coast, Big 12 and Big Ten conferences. But that league announced last week that it was adding four teams from the Mountain West in 2026 as it begins to reconfigure itself.

No current ACC member has ever played at Corvallis while active in the league. New ACC members California and Stanford were regular opponents of Oregon State in their former Pac-12 home.

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