Stanford Football Set to Renew Rivalry with Former Pac-12 Foe

Stanford football is fully focused on the upcoming 2026 season, but that does not mean that the future is not important. On Tuesday, the Cardinal announced that they would play two games against former Pac-12 rival, Arizona State, to begin the 2030s, with one game slated to be at home and the other slated to be away.

Last meeting in 2022 when both schools were still in the Pac-12, the Cardinal and the Sun Devils will play a home-and-home series that begins in 2031, with Arizona State coming to Stanford Stadium on Sept. 6, 2031 and Stanford traveling to Tempe on Sept. 11, 2032.

Those meetings will be only the second and third time that the two schools will face each other in a non-conference regular season setting. Stanford and Arizona State played each other in the 2013 Pac-12 Championship Game, which the Cardinal won 38-14.

In the 2022 game, the Cardinal hosted the Sun Devils and won 15-14, their final win in a 3-9 season. Dating back to 2009, the Cardinal are 7-2 against Arizona State and among universities with an active football team, Stanford and Arizona State have faced each other the 10th most times of any program at 34.

The dates for the Stanford-Arizona State games may be multiple years out, but now the Cardinal have two non-conference games added to the mix on their 2031 schedule.

That same year, the Cardinal will play in the Bill Walsh Legacy Game once again against San Jose State on Sept. 20, 2031. And given the ACC's scheduling format of nine conference games, Stanford only has room for one more non-conference game that season.

But first, the focus is firmly on 2026 where the Cardinal will look to build off of a promising '25 campaign. Led by an interim head coach in Frank Reich (now with the New York Jets), the Cardinal finished 4-8.

Despite missing out on a bowl game yet again, the Cardinal improved from their 3-9 record that had plagued them the previous four years, and looked like a team that was truly building something, with a number of facets of the program coming into focus over the course of the season.

Hiring a new permanent head coach in Tavita Pritchard, the Cardinal are once again in a new era, but this time they are ready to win more than ever.

The new-look Cardinal will begin their 2026 season at home on Aug. 29, when the Hawaii Rainbow Warriors come to town in a game that the Cardinal will surely be out for revenge. Last season in Honolulu, the Cardinal went in hungry to win but fell short in heartbreaking fashion to Hawaii.

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