If they’re FBS, even independent, they can pay us $450,000 when we travel to their place like other FBS programs do.

https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/44510429/sources-sacramento-state-apply-become-fbs-independent

My concern is that Dr. wood is doing this to boost his image with goal of jumping ship to a bigger school in a few years and then leave the sac state athletic dept in debt.
He always makes every announcement about him and puts himself front and center when it is the job of others such as the AD.

In addition to all the other obvious problems, how are they going to have any home games in 2026? Who is going to play there besides us?

Now others may disagree including fans of Sac State, but this seems like a fairly big loss for them considering how much Pac12 or bust chatter there was. I mean, congrats to them for making the jump to FBS since that was such a large goal of Dr. Woods, but I would definitely have some concerns if I were a fan of that program.

I can hear my mother now, “In this economy!”

This is a confusing move unless there’s some plan to slide into a conference after the next (inevitable) conference shakeup. They join UConn, UMASS and Notre Dame as FBS independents. I don’t see any of those three traveling to Sac. Maybe a home/home with some MWC teams, but scheduling once conference okay starts seems challenging!

Probably the cheapest way to go FBS - leave the other sports in a ‘FCS’ (lower mid-major) conference, although there doesn’t seem to be a TV revenue stream to offset costs.

Can’t imagine selling a fee increase to students to pay for this!

Can’t imagine the donors who pledged that $50M NIL money had this in mind.

maybe the hope is to fill in their schedule with rest of the Pac 8 and integrate into that conference at some point.

Assuming that conference exists in 2-3 years. Same as us assuming the MWC exists when we’re ready.

In the current state of college football, trying to guess the landscape in 2-3 years seems difficult. The power 4 has taken over.

Easy to get road games but none of those Pac 8 teams will have a reason to play at Sac

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I think Dr Wood is so consumed with the "FBS or Bust" campaign that charting a well researched, prudent path to the FBS is lost in all the hype and hyperbole. He sees Sac as a budding, FBS, power football program that can follow a path similar to what Deion Sanders has done at Colorado. So they bring in a coach with name recognition who is on the college football fast track and build a team by recruiting highly rated players, some of which have a history of problems at previous schools, while showing the door to many of the current players on the roster. Winning at any cost is the name of the game.

He is willing to take the chance to go independent in order to gain national recognition by scheduling a few games against power schools and, hopefully, pulling some upsets while winning their other games by blowouts. The whole idea is betting that the power conferences will come calling if you win and talk loud enough while building a program with a lot of splash and talk of cash. He believes that if they win big and talk loud and they will come...it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

We’ll all feel bad when Notre Dame comes to Sac to play!

….and think of Duke, Kentucky, etc., playing basketball at The Nest!

And South Carolina women’s basketball!

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I honestly have never seen a program do it this way. It’s usually done very quietly.

This whole thing feels like Chappelle riffing as Rick James - - like there's not much of a plan, but you gotta keep the energy up and get something great out of it. An old viking once said, "Luck, often enough will save a man, if his courage hold." This whole leap before you look approach is a little nuts in my mind, and it's not to say they haven't done much looking, because clearly they are recruiting coaches and players and donations to this entire effort in a big way, but it's interesting to watch and it'll be more interesting to see what happens!

Some Sac fan on this board said the pac x was a done deal and look for a major announcement soon. That obviously never materialized. Standing back and looking at this entire scenario is sort of comical. I couldn’t make this stuff up if i tried.

Why not play at Hughes Stadium? Notre Dame will fill it. s/

Some of the chatter among the Hornet “insiders” is that the PAC12 and MWC both wanted them so bad but were giving them lowball offers and this indy move is because Wood knows their real value and the PAC12 will come crawling back in a couple years with a big boy offer.

I mean, I guess you never know but it seems closer to the delusion end of the spectrum of possibilities. I guess only time will tell, but I have to imagine that if this doesn't work out Dr. Woods is going to be up a creek without a paddle.

Interesting thread from the Griz site on going independent.

https://egriz.com/threads/pam-state-applying-to-go-fbs-independent.96580/

FACT: If they had been invited to the PAC-12, they would have definitely accepted it.

exactly. If they had been offered the chance to lick the urinal cakes in PAC12 offices they would have done it told us how great it tasted. They weren’t so they didn’t.

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