Air Force will face a four-week midseason gauntlet of rivals it was revealed on Thursday with the release of the 2023 Mountain West football schedule.
The Falcons will host Wyoming on Oct. 14, then in the following three weeks play at Navy, at Colorado State and host Army in Denver.
This is the first iteration of the Mountain West’s new schedule that ditches its divisions. Instead of two six-team divisions, teams are given two protected rivalries (Wyoming and Colorado State in Air Force’s case) and play six of the other nine teams in the conference on a rotating basis. New Mexico is the only prior Mountain Division team not on the schedule, so the change is hardly a dramatic one in this first year.
The Falcons will play the season with Falcon Stadium under extensive, $90 million renovations. That was part of the reasoning behind moving the Army game to Empower Field at Mile High. The home slate will be Robert Morris (Sept. 2), Utah (Sept. 16), San Diego State (Sept. 30), Wyoming (Oct. 14) and UNLV (Nov. 18).
The crunching of rivals wouldn’t have been possible in most seasons, since the Navy game had typically been held on the first Saturday of October and Army on the first Saturday of November. This year, for reasons neither academy could recall, the Navy game was moved to late in October and the conference scheduled a game in the week between the service academy games.
Air Force is coming off a 10-3 season, its third consecutive full season with at least 10 wins. The team must replace quarterback Haaziq Daniels and fullback Brad Roberts, both three-year standouts, but will feature a defense stacked with returners.
The 2023 opponents and locations were already known, but the schedule release assigns the dates to those games. The open date for Air Force is Oct. 7. Games could slide to Thursdays or Fridays after television networks make their claims to matchups.
AIR FORCE 2023 FOOTBALL SCHEDULE
Games could slide from Saturdays to Thursday/Friday
Sept 2 – vs. Robert Morris
Sept. 9 – at Sam Houston
Sept. 16 – vs. Utah State
Sept. 23 – at San Jose State
Sept. 30 – vs. San Diego State
Oct. 7 – open
Oct. 14 – vs. Wyoming
Oct. 21 – at Navy
Oct. 29 – at Colorado State
Nov. 4 – vs. Army in Denver
Nov. 11 – at Hawaii
Nov. 18 – vs. UNLV
Nov. 25 – at Boise State
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