COLUMBIA, Mo. 鈥 Missouri football has made a scheduling swap for the 2025 season.
Mizzou will no longer face Miami University of Ohio on the road and will instead add a previously unreported home game against Central Arkansas.
That game is scheduled for Saturday, August 30, 2025, according to a contract between MU and Central Arkansas obtained by the Post-Dispatch through an open records request. Missouri will pay Central Arkansas $500,000 for its participation in the game.
The Tigers and Bears have never played each other in football. Central Arkansas is a Football Championship Subdivision, or FCS, program that plays in the United Athletic Conference.
MU and Central Arkansas agreed to the game in April 2021, when Jim Sterk was Missouri's athletics director. Those teams were supposed to play during the first week of the 2020 season, but that game was canceled due to broader COVID-19 shake-up of college football schedules around the country.
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Mizzou's cancellation of its game against Miami, which would have been played in the latter's Oxford, Ohio stadium that seats 24,000, dodges an away affair at a smaller opponent. That game had been scheduled in April 2016.
While it was contractually a one-off, that game was set to follow two previous matchups between Missouri and Miami that took place in 2010 and 2011.
Though the cancellation of the 2025 Tigers-Redhawks fixture wasn't apparent until recently, MU bought out the game in 2023 under athletics director Desiree Reed-Francois. That means the buyout cost Missouri $750,000, according to the game contract, as opposed to $1 million had the opt-out happened in 2024.
Prior to the cancellation, Mizzou had five nonconference games on the books for 2025, requiring one to be removed from the schedule at some point.
Replacing a road game with a home game can allow Missouri to capture more revenue from its 2025 football season, which will now include eight games held within Memorial Stadium. That is likely to be more valuable for the school as it enters the revenue-sharing era.
Mizzou's 2025 four-game nonconference schedule is now:
August 30 vs. Central Arkansas
September 6 vs. Kansas
October 4 vs. Louisiana-Lafayette
October 18 vs. UMass