THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. - The 2023 Cal Lutheran football schedule has been announced with five home and five away football games. 

The Kingsmen will play two non-conference opponents and eight Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC) games. The SCIAC has established a Championship game that will pit the top teams between two pods – dubbed the 'Sun' and 'Surf' divisions – to determine the conference's official champion and recipient of the automatic qualifying berth to the NCAA Championships.

The league's six teams will be grouped into two pods of three, organized on a two-year cycle. Teams will play opponents in their pod twice and teams in the other pod once for a total of seven games that count toward the conference standings. Games will take place from Weeks 4-10, with the teams holding the best record in each pod playing for the championship at the site of the team with the best record (the head-to-head winner will host in the case of a tie). The second-and third-place teams in each pod will also face each other in third- and fifth-place games that will alternate home sites by pod each year. The Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference is the only other conference in Division III that currently plays a championship game; the Midwest Conference and former NEFC previously also played divisional schedules with a title game, according to D3football.com.

Cal Lutheran, Chapman and Claremont-Mudd-Scripps will compete in one pod while La Verne, Pomona-Pitzer and Redlands compete in the other for the 2023 and '24 seasons.

The season starts on at home with Southwestern on Sept 2nd. The second non-conference game is at Pacific Lutheran on Sept. 16th. Conference play will begin on September 23rd at CMS. The first home conference game is Sept. 30th against Chapman. More notable games are the Smudge Pot Trophy Game at Redlands on Oct. 14 and Senior Day with CMS on Nov. 4th. The regular season ends on Nov. 11th with a championship, third-place, and fifth-place game.