Sacramento State’s $23M gamble: Is joining MAC the ‘sweetheart deal’ president envisions?

Luke Wood remembers roaming Sacramento State’s campus as a student. Long before the current university president wore suits to work, he recalls living out of his car as an undergrad, “not knowing when my next meal would come.”

It is in that same spirit that he now pushes the Hornets football program into a conference clear on the other side of the continent.

Wood couldn’t sign the contract fast enough. The deal, a football-only move from the Football Championship Subdivision to the Football Bowl Subdivision and Mid-American Conference, marked the apex of his three-year presidency and his quest to transform Sacramento State into a national brand.

When the ink dried on Feb. 13, Sacramento State became the first West Coast school to jump to the FBS in 57 years. The total price tag on history: $23 million.

“This was unquestionably the hardest thing I’ve ever been part of,” Wood told The Athletic. “Because everybody was rooting against this, rather than rooting for us.

“Let me be real: It is an investment, and it is a lot of money. I also think that in five years, people are going to say, ‘Wow, that was a sweetheart deal.’ Because I think the price of doing business is only going up. The value of being at FBS is only going up.”

For Wood’s gamble to pay off, it almost assuredly has to.

Sacramento State is paying millions to play football in a conference three time zones away, and will cover travel expenses for every league game it participates in over the next five years for the right to do so. The Hornets will do it without collecting any revenue sharing and with no guarantee of remaining in the MAC when the agreement ends in 2030.

Still, a school that announced a $37 million deficit and campus layoffs a year ago forges ahead, with Wood intent on turning Sacramento State football into an “activator” that drives enrollment and visibility.

UC Davis athletic director Rocko DeLuca, once a deputy AD at UMass when the Minutemen jumped from FCS to FBS, knows the perils of such ambitions. He saluted Sacramento State’s push, but also offered a warning.

“Sometimes all that glitters isn’t gold,” DeLuca said. “It’s a bigger leap than people realize.”

The investment

The move is a financial leap of faith, with Sacramento diving headfirst into deep water.

According to Wood and athletic director Mark Orr, the school will pay a $5 million FBS reclassification fee and $18 million to the Mid-American Conference over five years – $6 million up front and $3 million annually after that.

Both said the initial $6 million MAC payment and $5 million reclassification fee will come from nonstate sources, corporate sponsorships, philanthropic gifts, campus food sales and other nonfederal revenue. Not from new student fees or the state’s general fund.

The goal is for football to one day fund itself. The deal’s terms – no revenue sharing and Sacramento State covering visiting teams’ travel despite the nearest MAC member being nearly 2,000 miles away – require long-term investment. It’s a deal the school’s chief financial officer, Rose McAuliffe, said the university has long prepared to make.

“We’ve been saving for the last couple of years,” McAuliffe said. “It’s not like, all of a sudden, we’re, ‘Oh no, what do we do?’ There’s a thought process.”

For MAC commissioner Jon Steinbrecher, the deal offered little risk and plenty of reward.

“It ended up being a very strong business deal for our conference,” Steinbrecher said. “Which was certainly attractive.”

Sacramento sits in a top-20 media market, with roughly 2.5 million people in the metro area and only one major pro team, the Sacramento Kings. Wood believes the region can, and should, support high-level Division I football.

But not without upgrades. The 21,000-seat Hornet Stadium – deemed substandard for FBS football in a 2023-24 Colleges Sports Solutions feasibility study – will be renovated with student fees already designated for athletic facilities. The operating budget must rise, too. The school’s 2025 FBS application, obtained by The Athletic through a public records request, lists a $31 million budget projected to rise to $40.1 million during reclassification.

“It’s a status,” Orr said. “We can legitimately tell our student-athletes, our recruits, and our community, this is the highest level of Division I football.

“Sacramento State now has a pathway, not only to a bowl game, but to play for a national championship. As crazy as that sounds. A week ago, there was no pathway.”

That pathway has historically been narrow in the MAC, a conference that has produced one Top 25 team in the final College Football Playoff rankings since 2014. Still, it’s the pathway that was available to Sac State.

The school’s previous efforts to land in a West Coast FBS conference – the Pac-12 or Mountain West – yielded no invitations. Independence wasn’t an option since the NCAA required the Hornets to receive a conference invitation. Enter the MAC, which was attracted to Sacramento’s television market, prior investments and potential to grow.

Before the 2025 season, Sacramento State hired UNLV offensive coordinator Brennan Marion and paid him what was believed to be the highest salary in FCS at $750,000 a year. The program also landed former four-star quarterback Jaden Rashada from the transfer portal.

The Hornets finished 7-5. Rashada was benched. He and Marion were gone by season’s end. Still, Sacramento State had shown its intent.

“What I found very intriguing,” Steinbrecher said, “was here was this very large, very dynamic university … a world of possibilities and opportunity.”

On the other side of the deal, the appeal is simple: The MAC offers national exposure to the Hornets via its television deals.

“We’re going to be on ESPN and CBS Sports on a regular basis,” Wood said. “That’s the win. We won right before we’ve even played a game, we won. … Nothing brings in donors, alumni, enrollment, or community engagement like athletics.”

The campus

While Sacramento State sits in the heart of a major media market, a significant portion of the student population has historically lived off campus. According to the university’s 2025 Fact Book, 30,883 students enrolled in the 2024 fall semester, but only 3,200 of those students lived on campus.

The school’s new policy requiring incoming first-year students to live in university housing for their first two academic years could change that.

In 2025, Wood attempted to turn Hornets games into events, funding large-scale concerts with student engagement fees to draw students, corporate sponsors and alumni. Artists including Lil Yachty, Quavo and Blxst performed.

The resulting average home attendance figures last season – 15,468 fans, according to the school – would have put the Hornets right around the middle of the pack in the MAC.

“Our marker of success really is, can we use football and sports to generate revenue in a way that most campuses can’t because of this unique situation of not having an impacted media market?” Wood said. “Then, second, does it raise the visibility of the university?”

The concerts stood in contrast to events the previous spring.

In April 2025, The State Hornet reported that Wood announced a $37 million deficit driven by rising costs and proposed cuts from Gov. Gavin Newsom. The university eliminated or consolidated 28 management positions, including 15 layoffs, prompting student and faculty walkouts and calls for Wood to resign.

Wood noted that the budget is contractually allocated, and athletic funds cannot be redirected elsewhere. Faculty understand. Still, it doesn’t keep Andrea Terry, an assistant professor in communications studies, from questioning institutional priorities.

“I understand this money for athletics is coming from a different pot,” Terry said. “So the question is who’s putting what money in which pot? And how do we make sure that we have enough money in the instructional pot, in the maintenance pot, to make sure that we can serve our students effectively?”

In February, student Michael Lee-Chang wrote an op-ed in The Sacramento Bee questioning the MAC move and the school’s direction. Speaking with The Athletic, he argued for funding elsewhere, citing classrooms with no air conditioning and bathrooms with curtains for stall doors.

“The measure of a university is not how many people you can fill your football stadium with,” Lee-Chang said. “It’s how many students can you serve? How many students can you help graduate? How many students can you teach? And every day, I feel like we’re straying further and further away from our academic mission.”

Sophomore linebacker Derek Houston sees it differently. He sees a chance to showcase Sacramento and its football on a grander stage, fueled by a belief not far from the one guiding the president’s push.

“I’m from Sacramento, so I know how important it is,” Houston said.

“At the end of the day, they did what was necessary to get us to the next level.”

The payoff

The university enlisted Collegiate Consulting to study the potential economic impact of the move on Sacramento State and the surrounding economy.

Wood summarized the findings in a post on X, writing that athletics could generate $975 million in economic impact, boost national broadcast valuation to $675 million and raise game-day economic activity to $46 million.

Wood argued that the predictions show a net positive benefit by 2027.

The study, which Collegiate Consulting declined to release publicly but The Athletic reviewed, projected a one-year economic impact of about $194.4 million. That number stems from a wide-ranging economic prediction, including metrics such as the estimated value of athletic department social media accounts and projected athletes’ salaries upon graduation and entering the state’s workforce. Wood’s five-year total extrapolated that figure across the length of the MAC agreement.

The estimate attracted immediate skepticism.

“It’s all very similar to the media that we’ve gotten this whole year,” Wood said. “We didn’t do it the way other campuses have done. We didn’t win 10 national championships to become FBS. Instead, we were a case study in intentional disruptive marketing to get where we needed to be, and we were able to do in two and a half years what takes other campuses a lot longer.”

Wood’s reference was to North Dakota State, which will also move from the FCS to FBS in 2026. The Bison won 10 national titles between 2011 and 2024 and will join the Mountain West at a cost of roughly $18 million, with no set term length.

“There’s a reason that both of us were willing to pay this much money to do it,” Wood said. “We understand the value of what it brings. I still remain perplexed as to why we get more questions about it than North Dakota State.”

Sacramento State plans to tap into new revenue to make things work. It recently regained control of concessions, parking, and merchandising from a third-party operator and expects growth from increased visibility.

Game guarantees represent another potential gain. Orr said Sacramento State earned roughly $375,000 to $400,000 for a road game at Fresno State last season. By comparison, San Jose State earned $1.6 million for a road game at Auburn two years earlier.

The dream, of course, is the possibility of becoming the next Boise State – a western school that began as a junior college in 1932 and didn’t reach the FBS until 1996. Since then, the Broncos have gone 13-10 in bowl games, won three Fiesta Bowls and built a national reputation that earned them an invitation to the Pac-12 ahead of 2026.

Former Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson, who invited the Broncos to his conference in 2010, isn’t sure that’s something that can be replicated in modern college football.

“I don’t think there’s going to be a next Boise State,” Thompson said. “(Boise) made an investment and a commitment to college football at a time when it could be done. (In today’s landscape) if you go from hypothetically a $30 million budget to a $50 million budget, is that really moving the needle? That might not even be the average of that new league.”

The precedent

At the end of the five-year deal, the MAC and Sacramento State will reassess the partnership. In an age of constant realignment, a bigger opportunity could surface. Or, if the West Coast outpost fails to deliver, the conference could move on, leaving the Hornets nestless.

College football offers examples of both.

Boise State found success over multiple decades and will soon play in the Pac-12 because of it. More recently, James Madison jumped in 2022 and reached the College Football Playoff by 2025, backed by eight straight FCS playoff appearances and 18 overall. The Hornets have four FCS playoff appearances in school history.

Idaho followed the opposite path. After moving up in 1996, the Vandals went 74-157 over two decades, reached three bowls and cycled through conferences before returning to the FCS in 2018. The Vandals have regained their footing in the Big Sky Conference since.

The range underscores the uncertainty surrounding the Hornets’ bet. Wood remains convinced the move will only elevate his university’s profile.

“I never once changed (my determination) even despite all the pot shots people were taking at us. At the same time, it’s hard for people to see a place they’ve never been yet,” Wood said.

“We were fortunate to basically have executed on a playbook that hasn’t been used, and to do it well. I would say to give it some time.”