Hornets or Nomads? Sac State bets house in football gamble — and loses | Opinion

In an annual tradition dating back to 1954, Sacramento State travels to UC Davis Saturday for a football game with playoff implications. There is something bittersweet about this year’s Causeway Classic, for none is scheduled for next year.

It is the consequence of Sacramento State’s decision to leave the second-division conference in which it’s competed alongside and against the Aggies in hopes of ascendancy come 2026 to college football’s big leagues, the Football Bowl Subdivision.

But the invitation for such a promotion has never arrived. So Sacramento State faces the rare prospect of being a nomad of sorts in college football, a team without a home conference and, so far, only a handful of games on its 2026 schedule.

“We certainly are planning an independent schedule,” Sac State Athletics Director Mark Orr said in a recent interview. “We’ll release it somewhere in February or March. We certainly will have a full schedule ready to go.”

That wouldn’t be the 2026 that University President Luke Wood envisioned back in April when he set all this change in motion. He left the Sac State football program’s home for 30 years, the Big Sky Conference of the Football Championship Subdivision, in hopes of becoming an independent team in the FBS.

“I’m stoked and excited about the independent route,” Wood said at the time. “My thinking is that this is the best pathway for Sacramento State to the FBS, and we’re taking destiny in our own hands.”

This audacious leap has, unsurprisingly, resulted in a cascade of complications. At this juncture, Sacramento State’s bid for football prominence so far has proven both ill-timed and poorly executed.

The football gods of the National Collegiate Athletic Association in June said “no” to Sac State’s request to waive all the standard requirements to enter the FBS, such as an invitation to join one of its conferences. Never mind, Wood said at the time. “We’re full steam ahead and we still plan to be playing FBS football in 2026.”

For now, that’s not the actual plan.

Who to play? And where?

To date, Sac State has four games identified for the 2026 schedule — away at Fresno State University (an FBS opponent) and then home against FCS opponents including the Youngstown State Penguins of Ohio, the Southern Utah Thunderbirds and the Cardinals of Texas’ Lamar University.

The Hornets will reportedly pay Youngstown State $350,000 to come to Sacramento, a sample of the cost an independent university must pay when seeking teams to play. Whether playing as an independent will cost Sac State more money is something to watch.

Orr faces two significant challenges to cobble together the remaining eight games One is that the big FBS teams are largely spoken for next year. And the other is that there is little tradition of FCS teams from distant regions of the country playing anyone in California.

A Sacramento Bee review of the 2026 football schedules for 137 FBS teams found that all but perhaps 10 have lined up their one FCS opponent (per NCAA rules) for next year (not all top teams typically play this game). That’s slim pickings.

As for the 120-some fellow FCS teams, “there’s a lot in the South, in the East, in the Midwest,” Orr said. “Yeah, we’d have to play out of region.”

In the meantime, Orr is hoping his phone may ring someday with an invitation to join an FBS conference. The Pac12 Conference, once decimated by a mass exodus, is back to eight football teams this season and looking to expand. Another potential target is the Mountain West Conference.

“There’s no really clean process of how this works,” Orr said. “It’s very subjective in terms of conference invites. Those are up to those conference presidents and chancellors and the conference commissioner.”

Other Hornet athletic programs on track

While the football team prepares for life outside a conference, the rest of the university’s athletics program is now firmly rooted in California. The Big West Conference, with nine California institutions, invited Sac State earlier this year to be its 10th member (the conference does not compete in football). Orr enthusiastically accepted.

The Hornet Basketball team is playing in a new cozy home, the 3,000-seat Hornet Pavilion. Orr has created a path not just for the football program but for every athletic team that is under his umbrella. That’s a responsibility he didn’t take lightly.

Orr still holds out hope that UC Davis will come to Sacramento to continue the Causeway Classic next year. But the Aggies have already scheduled their non-conference games for 2026. And they show no signs of breaking a commitment to playing those games simply because of Wood’s gamble to aim for the FBS, only to fall short for now.

“I can go to sleep at night knowing that 18 of our other programs are in a great situation, and our coaches,” Orr said. “Are we unsettled right now with our football program? Yeah, we don’t have that solidified yet, but that’s one program.”

He’s right, but the consequence is clear: Sacramento State is now left to deal with the fallout of a reckless leap toward football glory, with no viable path forward.

This story was originally published November 21, 2025 at 5:00 AM.