Missouri announces home-and-home football series with Boston College

On Tuesday, Missouri announced that it had agreed to a two-year, home-and-home series with the Boston College Eagles. The Tigers will head to Chestnut Hill in 2021, then host BC in 2024.

COLUMBIA, Mo. – The University of Missouri and Boston College have agreed to a two-game football series, as announced mutually today by both schools. The first game of the home-and-home arrangement is set for Sept. 25, 2021 at Boston College, with the return game at Mizzou scheduled for Sept. 14, 2024.

The 2021 meeting in Chestnut Hill, Mass. will mark the first-ever meeting between the Tigers and Eagles. It will also mark the first time since 2000 that Mizzou has faced a sitting member of the Atlantic Coast Conference during the regular season. Mizzou defeated North Carolina in the 2011 Independence Bowl (W, 41-24), but the last time the Tigers met an ACC foe in regular-season play was a two-game series with Clemson during the Larry Smith era (Mizzou won a 38-24 game in Columbia in 1996, and fell at Clemson in 2000, 62-9). Mizzou did face current ACC member Syracuse in the 2012 season, but that was a year before they joined the league.

"We're pleased to announce this series," said Executive Associate Athletic Director Bryan Maggard, who oversees scheduling. "Boston College is certainly a quality program with good name recognition so we feel this is an attractive matchup for our fans. It also gets us into an area in the Northeast where we don't often get to, and we certainly have a lot of Mizzou alumni in that region who will have the chance to see their Tigers in person," he said.

If you’re keeping track at home, then, here are the non-conference games Mizzou has arranged moving forward:

• 2017: Missouri State (Sept. 2), Purdue (Sept. 16), Idaho (Oct. 21), at UConn (Oct. 28)
• 2018: UT-Martin (Sept. 1), Wyoming (Sept. 8), at Purdue (Sept. 15), Memphis (Oct. 20)
• 2019: at Wyoming (Aug. 31), West Virginia (Sept. 7), SEMO (Sept. 14), Troy (Oct. 19)
• 2020: Central Arkansas (Sept. 5), Eastern Michigan (Sept. 26), at BYU (Nov. 7), ?
• 2021: at Boston College (Sept. 25), North Texas (Oct. 16), ?, ?
• 2022: at Middle Tennessee (Sept. 17), ?, ?, ?
• 2023: Middle Tennessee (Sept. 9), at Memphis (Sept. 23), ?, ?
• 2024: Boston College (Sept. 24), ?, ?, ?

Scheduling games this far out frustrates me greatly and allows for almost no flexibility whatsoever should certain opportunities — a season-opening neutral site game, a more marquee home-and-home, a certain former rival getting its head out of its rear end — present themselves. But Mizzou is very much not alone in this practice.

We will now proceed to forget all about this, as the first of the two games is still nearly five years away.