Paul Wiley likes to say that college football has been part of his relationship with his fiancée Natalie Wengroff from the start.
They spent their first date watching the Michigan-Notre Dame football game in 2012. Wiley is a Virginia grad whose parents live in Charlottesville. Wengroff is a Michigan grad who grew up going to games in Ann Arbor and believing that the final game of every season was played at the Rose Bowl by rule. Their shared love of college football brought them closer, whether in a rainstorm at the Big House or in the slightly less expansive Scott Stadium.
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“We definitely started out as people who were like, ‘The only type of friends who schedule weddings in the fall are former friends,’” Wiley said. “We were absolutely adamant that there was no way we were doing a fall wedding.”
They got engaged in September 2018, and as they began wedding planning, they set a couple of parameters. They would not consider fall dates, and they would only look at spring dates after the men’s Final Four, in case Virginia went on a run. They settled on April 25, 2020. (“The ‘perfect date,’ ironically, from ‘Miss Congeniality,’” Wengroff noted.)
By the middle of March 2020, all the major details had long been ironed out. The Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C. was booked, as were all the vendors. The menu was set. They had sent the invitations out. Wiley and Wengroff were in the home stretch — and then the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a halt. Sports shut down. Office workers went remote. And couples like Wiley and Wengroff were left in limbo.
At first, they thought April 2021 would be doable, but then it wasn’t. So they are now onto their third and hopefully final wedding date: Sept. 4, 2021, the first full Saturday of the upcoming college football season. Michigan will be hosting Western Michigan at noon that day, and Virginia will be hosting William & Mary at 7:30 p.m.
“By the time we pushed it again, we completely stopped caring,” Wiley said. “I do not care.”
“I have given up on Michigan football,” added Wengroff. “So, this fall at least, I will have more time.”
The Wedding Report, an industry research firm, estimates that there will be 2.77 million weddings in the U.S. in 2021 — compared to just 1.1 million in 2020. That estimate would be a 30 percent increase over 2019. Essentially, there are two years’ worth of weddings happening this year. And after a slow return to something like normal in most areas over the first half of this year, many of those weddings are ticketed for the fall, which is as close to blasphemous as you can get for college football fans in some parts of this country.
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But this year, there were few other options. Fans, friends and family alike will simply have to deal with it.
“I’m 31, and I’d say if this were eight years ago, it would definitely have been more of a factor,” said Megan Olson, an Arkansas grad getting married on the day of the Arkansas-LSU game. “Like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re getting married on game day.’ But I actually haven’t heard that from a single soul, which is very interesting.
“I did not even consider college football, which is actually kind of weird because I always thought that I would.”
What Olson wanted most was to be married on the 13th of the month, so she was open to whatever option there was in the fall. Her grandparents had met each other on the 13th, and her parents had gotten married on the 13th. It was an important number to her, far more important than any individual SEC matchup would be. (Olson’s fiancé went to Texas A&M, so she thinks they might have actively avoided the day of the Arkansas-A&M game had that fallen on a 13th, but that would have been the only exception.)
Their celebration will coincide with Arkansas-LSU and Texas A&M-Ole Miss, and Olson expects at least a handful of wedding guests to be watching one of the games on their phones during the ceremony. There are going to be friends and family members with ties to both schools, and at least a few guests are LSU grads, too. “There will definitely be people who will have it on their phone, and that does not bother me at all,” Olson said.
Elite move if you get invited to a #FallWedding. (h/t /r/Unexpected) pic.twitter.com/v5h5spLE5I
— RedditCFB (@RedditCFB) June 28, 2021
Andrew Redston and his fiancée Kailyn are getting married on Oct. 9 in Bloomington, Ind., where they met as undergraduate students at Indiana University. Fortunately, that Saturday is an idle week for the Hoosiers, which they didn’t know when they originally picked it. (The Big Ten schedule has been revised a few times due to the shortened season in 2020.)
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Even though he and his former classmates have high hopes for Indiana football this year, Redston said the main reason he’s pleased they managed to avoid a college football Saturday is one of practicality. Bloomington isn’t very big, and there aren’t many hotels. If the wedding had coincided with a home football weekend, guests would have had to shell out to stay at a hotel in town or settle for accommodations far outside city limits. “We were kind of freaking out,” Redston said.
The couple got engaged in August 2020, and by the time they called the venue they wanted a few weeks later, they were told it was fully booked every Saturday for the fall of 2021. Another place had the October date available, and they grabbed it.
Of all the years for an Indiana couple to get married on an off weekend, it’s an especially lucky break in 2021. The Hoosiers have never had higher preseason expectations, coming off a season in which they beat Penn State and Michigan. Redston said he was in the middle of their small, outdoor engagement party during the Indiana-Penn State game last year, whipping out his laptop at his own party to watch overtime.
Elly Newell, an Illinois grad who is marrying her fiancé Jared in Chicago in November, said one of the biggest challenges of rescheduling their wedding — the couple was originally supposed to get married in June 2020 and is now on wedding date No. 3 — was coordinating with their other engaged friends. Newell said she was supposed to attend 10 weddings in 2020, and then two more friends got engaged during the pandemic. A handful of couples essentially eloped or chose to do something small. But Newell kept an iPhone Notes app page updated with friends’ targeted wedding dates (and their backup dates) to try to avoid overlap as much as possible.
“I’ve been to a wedding where my friend‘s husband was a huge hockey fan, and I think the Blackhawks were in the playoffs,” Newell said. “They had a screen outside the wedding where the game was on. That will not be happening at our wedding. If people want to pull up games (on their phones), that’s fine.”
She chuckled.
“I’m sure even the people who were trying to work around a schedule — it’s just one day,” she said. “It’s much bigger than one football game.”
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Especially now. These couples have had so many starts and stops, they’re still just cautiously optimistic these second and third dates will actually work out. With the delta variant wreaking havoc across certain regions of the U.S., no one knows whether mask mandates or indoor capacity limits could come back into play to affect these special days. That’s why kickoff does, ultimately, take a backseat.
Wengroff said she hasn’t heard any complaints about scheduling a wedding on a Michigan game day from her side of the family, though Wiley suggested that could be because “everybody’s too scared of Natalie to do that.” At the reception, they plan to play “The Good Old Song “and “(Hail to) The Victors.” There will be some flags and banners for family and friends to take photos with. The couple has a mini-moon in Aruba planned for right after the ceremony and a larger, later honeymoon to the Maldives booked, too.
Ultimately, they’re willing to give up one thing they love for a day celebrating their love for one another with family and friends. Maybe it’s not exactly how they drew it up, but they believe reaching the finish line is worth it. And they can deal with anniversaries falling during football season when the time comes.
“Between the wedding and honeymoon, we’re missing more than half the (home Virginia) games this fall, and that’s probably something pre-pandemic I would have blanched at,” Wiley said. “But now it’s like, ‘Dude, I’m going to be married. I’m going to be on a tropical island. I can find a TV and at least catch the score.’
“There are bigger fish to fry.”
(Top photo: Jim Dedmon / Corbis / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
