After beating Wake Forest 40-6 on Saturday, Ole Miss football coach Lane Kiffin criticized the Demon Deacons for canceling a game against the Rebels previously scheduled for 2025.
“It’s kind of an unwritten rule not to do that,” Kiffin said.
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Wake Forest, athletic director John Currie said in a statement Wednesday, was just trying to keep up with the new rules of college sports. The program replaced its away date with Ole Miss with a home-and-home against Oregon State. The Deacs will visit Corvallis in 2025 before hosting the Beavers in Winston-Salem, N.C., in 2029.
“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,” Currie said. “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.”
As it was originally reported, Wake was forced to pay $1 million to get out of the Ole Miss contest, though unnamed sources told ESPN that their bill was actually smaller than that, based on the contract signed in 2014, and that the new slate will prove more financially lucrative for the ACC school.
With roughly 5,000 undergraduates, Wake Forest is the smallest Power Four school. Currie returned to his alma mater in 2019. The football team had made seven straight bowl game appearances before a 4-8 campaign in 2023.
Southeastern Conference rules typically require its teams to play at least one Power Four school in non-conference play.
“Now we’ve got to go find somebody, and most people are all scheduled up,” Kiffin said Saturday. “And even when you find somebody, you’ve got to go pay them.”
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