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The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/B1GSkyNorth on 2025-10-22 13:37:30+00:00.

Ahead of Friday night’s Big Sky After Dark showdown on ESPN2, we have an opportunity to look at the fascinating and at times cautionary tale of Sacramento State. A bit of a long story, but a chronicling of this bizarre chapter of FCS history is overdue.

  1. The Main Character

Our story begins in the spring of 2023, when the California State University Board of Trustees appointed Dr. J. Luke Wood to be the 9th president of their campus in Sacramento. One cannot tell this story without centering it around the enigmatic Dr. Wood. Wood’s rise in academia from a ward of the state to the youngest permanent university president in the country is a remarkable story of resilience, and that rise came through the California State University system; he is an alumnus of Sacramento State. Simply, he “is of” Sacramento State. From there, he has big plans for the campus, including creating an AI hub, Black honors program, college for foster youth and Combat U. "A 'BCU; minus the H. Naturally this expansion would include an interest in an up-and-coming football program, as a recruiting tool, even with all of its general ethical problems.

The Hornets were coming off of two consecutive Big Sky Conference championships (2022 split with Montana State), and had not lost a conference game since November 2, 2019. Sacramento State had pulled itself out of the bottom of the Big Sky; not bad for a program that started in 1954 with an all-time win percentage of .443. There was just one problem: the architect of this rise, Troy Taylor, left to take the position of head football coach at Stanford at the close of the Hornets’ 2022 season. Andy Thompson, the program’s defensive coordinator and a linebacker at Montana from 1999-2003, was promoted to head coach.

Normally, a head football coaching personnel decision would be up to the athletic director, and would be “his guy.” The university president would have some involvement, but usually just some vetting to make sure it’s not going to disrupt the rest of campus in a negative way, and double check all the compensation details, as there’s a high likelihood this is the highest paid employee on campus, even if the funding comes from private sources, and even at this level. Dr. Wood is a little different, as will become apparent later.

  1. A Seed Planted in a Hurricane

The summer of 2023 will probably go down as the most cataclysmic offseason in recent memory. Beyond a summer of scandals rocking Northwestern and Michigan and looming developments in player compensation on the rise, the Pac-12, a historic power conference of 64 years, we saw an unprecedented exodus of 10 of its 12 members fleeing to the Big Ten, Big XII, and ACC. This shadow loomed over every single game, including a 30-23 upset with Sacramento State over their old head coach, Troy Taylor, at Stanford on the Farm. Though the season would ultimately end with an 8-5 record, a win over California’s juggernaut of the last decade would be a feather in any cap.

Oregon State and Washington State, after relatively short litigation, secured the warchest of the Pac-12’s remaining assets and immediately went to work at rebuilding the league. After discussions with the Mountain West fell apart, the two took advantage of the existing rifts and resentment that existed in the league by inviting Boise State, San Diego State, Fresno State, and Colorado State early on during the 2024 college football season. Utah State would join shortly after.

Engaging in speculation is not always the smartest, but I try to come from a place of empathy and understanding. One has to at least entertain the thought that such an unorthodox and nontraditional decision maker, so cut from the CSU cloth, would see that result over Stanford of all teams and think that there has to be some opportunity for dramatic growth in the backdrop of all the chaos of realignment. All of the foregoing circumstances would probably tell me that this is what planted the seed for everything else that comes after.

  1. A Failure by Committee

Despite the successful coup at ripping the Mountain West in twain, the Pac-12 was only going to have 7 members for the 2026 season. An FBS conference needed 8 non-transitioning FBS members to continue operation as an FBS league. While all signs pointed to, well, non-transitioning FBS teams like Texas State who would fulfill those obligations, enter the Sac-12.

The Sac-12 Committee is a group of local business leaders and alumni of Sacramento State who believed that the opportunity was right to make a very public announcement in September 2024 that they intended to transition to the FBS and join the Pac-12. This committee put out jaw-dropping headlines like $50 million in commitments from local business owners specifically for name, image, and likeness compensation. They released a shiny rendering of a new football stadium with a capacity of 25,000.

But this was all a one-way street. There was no interest from the Pac-12, at least publicly. Though the 2026 football season has been pinned as a goal, there is no actionable timeline for the new stadium. And famously, the $50 million dollar figure is only in pledges from business owners if Sacramento State can successfully transition to FBS, as it is for the first 10 years of FBS football.

Embarrassingly, after all of the hoopla in the fall of 2024, the Hornets finished 3-9. Worst of all, the Hornets’ biggest rival, UC Davis:

To venture into speculation again, this had to be a significant slight for Dr. Wood and the Sac-12. Part of the defining dynamic of the Causeway Classic is the institutional conflicts between the University of California system and the California State University system. It would seem reasonable that, for someone so dyed-in-the-wool for the CSU system, this was just another unjust privilege given to the more prestigious UC campus. That conflict, after all, is likely the driving motivation why UC Berkeley chose to compete in the Atlantic Coast Conference rather than to share the Pac-12 with a CSU campus like San Diego State.

  1. A Fireworks Display

When the vision can only be described as “go big or go home,” what do you do when everyone tells you to “go home?” You keep looking for flashier fireworks. With the Pac-12 not in support of Sacramento State’s membership, and the Mountain West out of the question, Sacramento State applied for a waiver of the NCAA transition rules to move up to FBS as an independent. Then Coach Thompson resigned immediately following the 2024 season, on December 6.

Wood immediately got publicly involved with the coaching search. Wood tweets that he met with Michael Vick to be next head coach, but then shoots down the notion of Vick being the coach at all. Wood then made the announcement himself that UNLV OC Brennan Marion would be the new head coach. Marrion is absolutely the president’s man, with the same resiliency grindset background (Marrion apparently faced homelessness during his early coaching career) and flashy leadership style. Marrion gutted the program down to the studs, with a recruiting class of 71 players, with 40 incoming players being transfers. This class was headlined by players like Ernest Campbell, Dylan Gooden, Sam Adams II, Agiye Hall, and Jaden Rashada.

Over the offseason, Wood took a very public offense to critiques of the stadium project. To drum up excitement, [the school announced a series of concerts following several home games, with acts such as Lil Yachty and Quavo](hornetsports.com/feature/…

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