Sacramento State’s move to a new football home at Cal Expo did not arrive this season, and the team will open its first home game at Hornet Stadium instead. That leaves six home games between now and November in the old setting, even after officials had said they expected to be in the new place by now.
The delay matters because the Cal Expo plan was not a vague long-range idea. Sacramento State announced it last August as the stadium solution for its first season in the higher-level Football Bowl Subdivision, and players and fans were told to expect football at the fairgrounds by the start of this season. Mark Orr said on June 24, 2025 that he had extreme confidence the site could handle 6 Saturdays of football, with a new field as the program’s first priority and temporary seating for roughly 25,000 people, plus modular locker rooms, to get by.
Cost became part of the problem. By early this year, estimates for the project had climbed from $170 million to nearly $212 million, and emails between Cal Expo and Sacramento State leadership teams showed the racetrack conversion was already waylaid within months. That is the clearest reason the timetable slipped: a project pitched as ready for football never moved from the planning stage into the kind of visible work a season-start opening would require.
Now the site itself tells the story. This week, the grounds at Cal Expo showed no sign of the additional seating needed for college football, while Sacramento State is still preparing to host its six home games at Hornet Stadium. Alex Alcantar said there are no new developments to report, and that leaves the Cal Expo plan in a holding pattern just as the season is getting underway.
The larger question is no longer whether Sacramento State could play there this fall. It is whether Sacramento State and Cal Expo still intend to build the stadium at all. For now, the answer on the schedule is simple: Hornet Stadium remains home, and the promised move has been pushed off without a new date.
