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Hacksaw’s Thursday Podcast-1:30pm
You Tube..Lee Hacksaw Hamilton
Hot Topics-Stay for Fans Forum
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“COLLEGE FOOTBALL-ABSURD”
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I cannot wait for the next great West Coast football rivalry.
Forget about the history of USC-UCLA, the Civil War (Oregon-Oregon State) , the Apple Cup (Washington-Washington State) and even The Game (Cal-Stanford-in ACC) etc.
Park the limited interested in the Oil Can Trophy (Aztecs-Fresno) over there.
No more Holy War (BYU-Utah).
Make your plane ticket reservations early to see….Sacramento State-vs-Akron Zips…Mid American Conference football next fall.
This after you make reservations to see North Dakota State meet Hawaii in Mountain West play.
It goes on and on. Schools leaving where they were to try and be somebody they cannot be, a big time player.
None-the-less, everyone has an opinion on Sac State, which hasn’t won anywhere, joining a league in the Midwest.
An essay from Front Row Sports.com on the ever changing adversity of it all.
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Sacramento State joined the … what?
The MAC, a conference mostly based in and around Ohio, is adding Sacramento State from the FCS’ Big Sky Conference, as announced yesterday. It’s doing so on “a five-year term,” whatever that might mean. The Hornets seem to believe they’ll be in the NFC West by then.
As with Mountain West newcomer North Dakota State, Sacramento State’s move is happening immediately for the 2026 season, meaning it isn’t allowed to play in the FBS postseason for two years.
But unlike NDSU (and successful FBS newbies like Appalachian State and JMU), the Hornets were not big winners during their 33 years in FCS. Only two playoff wins, though both were in the 2020s. No semifinals since 1988, in Division II. After last season’s 7-5 finish, head coach Brennan Marion left to become Colorado’s OC. Local rival UC Davis has long been a superior program.
All realignment moves are ultimately about money, but this move is extremely about money. Sac State is expected to pay $18 million to join the MAC, $16 million more than Northern Illinois is paying to join the Mountain West. A key seven words: Yesterday’s MAC statement touted Sacramento State’s “record of investment” and “commitment to continued growth.”
For years now, Sacramento boosters have heavily promoted those investments, at one point trying to tempt the Pac-12 with talk of an Ohio State-sized NIL budget.
This week, school president Luke Wood claimed the MAC move will deliver “an estimated economic impact of $975M and national broadcast value of $675M over the next five years.”
(Joining the NFC West would add eight figures to the Hornets’ value, sure. But the MAC’s current ESPN deal reportedly pays about $8M per year … for the league’s 13 teams to split. Elite teams in the Big Ten and SEC might fall halfway short of $675M in five-year TV money.)
Beyond that diamond-eyed math, I can see some logic. Stakeholders believe they have the financial power to create a champion where there isn’t one, and they believe their metro population of 2.4 million people will begin falling in love with it. (Over the last few years, the Hornets have ranked around 12th in FCS in attendance, rarely selling out their 21,000-seat stadium.)
Neither the Pac-12 nor the Mountain West were interested enough to add Sac State, and the NCAA declined its request to join FBS without a conference invite. (In 2017, it approved such a request for Liberty, a program that had won a bit more consistently in FCS.)
So the idea appears to be: Buy a ticket into the weakest FBS conference, flood the field with NIL cash and quickly springboard into the Mountain West or Pac-12 and beyond. Money powered JMU’s rise, after all.
Sure. There is a dollar amount that could convince any five-star to move to the radiant city of Sacramento. And sure, gathering enough of those players on one roster would mean dominating the MAC. Maybe the Pac-12 and Mountain West will look silly for not buying in, then watch as the NFC West bids against the Premier League and Marvel Cinematic Universe for the Hornets.
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