Sacramento State

Troy Taylor arrived in 2019 and won the Big Sky title in his first season, ending 23 years of conference irrelevance. He won it again in 2021. He won it again in 2022, going back-to-back, finishing 30-8 across those three championship seasons — the first real dynasty in Sacramento State history. Then he left for Stanford that December, the way the good ones do at this level.

Brennan Marion rebuilt the buzz almost immediately — a Go-Go spread offense, a 7-5 season in 2025 — and then left too, one year in, to become Colorado's offensive coordinator under Deion Sanders. Two coaches, two departures, three years. If that were the whole story, Sacramento State would be a cautionary tale about mid-major programs as farm systems for bigger ones.

Instead, it's the setup for the biggest bet the program has ever made. The Hornets tried to go independent — the NCAA said no. They talked to Conference USA — that fell through around Christmas 2025. What they landed on instead was the Mid-American Conference, a football-only membership starting July 1, 2026, backed by a new 25,000-seat stadium and a $57 million NIL collective, the first West Coast program to reach the FBS in a generation. Alonzo Carter, hired that same December, is the third head coach since 2022 and the one tasked with making the number add up.

It costs the Hornets something real: the Causeway Classic, 71 years of playing UC Davis every November for a trophy made of cement, is on hold now that the game isn't a protected date. The 2025 finale — a 31-27 loss on a fourth-down incompletion at the UC Davis 27 — was very possibly the last one for a while. Sacramento State fans have made peace with that trade. The program thinks the Sacramento market, the money, and three Big Sky titles worth of proof are exactly what the FBS hasn't seen from a team this size before. The rest of the sport is watching to see if the math works, with two bowl-ineligible transition years to find out.