Air Force and Navy will break recent tradition with the date of their 2023 football game, but nobody is quite sure why.

The service academy matchup will be played on Oct. 21 in Annapolis, Md., wavering from the nearly two-decade standard of meeting on the first Saturday of October (with the exception of 2021, when the teams met on the 20th anniversary of 9/11).

The Oct. 21 date will put Air Force’s games against Navy and Army (Nov. 4 in Denver) just two weeks apart. The Mountain West schedule has not yet been released, so it’s a mystery if the Falcons will draw a bye or play a conference game during the week between. That schedule is likely to come in the next month.

Spokesmen from both academies could not pinpoint why the change was made, noting that the date was set in 2014 when the series was last extended. Both sides initially thought the move came at the request of the other program.

“It is so non-controversial that nobody remembers,” Navy senior associate athletic director for sports information Scott Strasemeier wrote in an email. “Certainly nobody is mad about it on either side.”

Over the past 20 years or so, Air Force has played Navy on the first Saturday of October, Army on the first Saturday of November and Army and Navy

have met on the second Saturday of December. But it hasn’t always been that way.

The Falcons and Midshipmen played on the last weekend of September in 2004 and 2007, and from 1985-99 the game was played on the second Saturday of October.

The normal pattern will return for the 2024-28 seasons, with Air Force and Navy again playing late in October in 2029.

The Oct. 21 date will match the latest in the season Air Force and Navy have played, as the game was also played on Oct. 21 in 1972.

Air Force owns a three-game winning streak over Navy, which will play the upcoming season under the direction of new coach Brian Newberry.

The other dates already set on Air Force’s 2023 schedule are the opener against Robert Morris on Sept. 2 at the under-construction Falcon Stadium. The next week the Falcons will travel to Houston to play Sam Houston State on Sept. 9.