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A few minutes ago, the news broke from Baylor AD Ian McCaw that Baylor will play a 2-game series with the BYU Cougars in 2021 and 2022. The series will have the Bears hosting the 2021 game in Waco before going TO Provo, Utah for the return trip in 2022. Here's the release from Baylor:
Home-and-home series with BYU set for 2021 and 2022: https://t.co/uVdECQeq8Q #SicEm pic.twitter.com/Hw3XR1FoGn
— Baylor Football (@BUFootball) March 31, 2016
Possibly the biggest news in this, aside from the game itself, is that the Big 12 Conference has agreed to treat this as a P5 game for the purposes of the conference's new mandate, meaning those years are now satisfied. With the 2020 game vs. Ole Miss in Houston already announce, Baylor's future non-conference schedules now look like this:
2016: Northwestern State, SMU, @Rice
2017: Liberty, UTSA, @Duke
2018: Abilene Christian, @UTSA, Duke
2019: UTSA, @Rice, ________
2020: Incarnate Word, Louisiana Tech, Ole Miss (Houston)
2021: @Louisiana Tech, Texas State, BYU
2022: Louisiana Tech, @Texas State, @BYU
2023: Texas State, Utah, _________
2024: @Utah, ________, _______
The bolded games are ones satisfying the P5 mandate set by the Big 12 Conference.
This is obviously big news for both programs, as BYU tries to establish legitimacy in a CFB world increasingly torn between P5s and non-P5s and Baylor attempts to further upgrade its scheduling to silence those concerns. This won't do it completely, since we don't have a P5 game until Duke in 2017, but it should do some. I'm excited about it.