In May 2016, the athletic directors of Colorado and North Dakota State signed an agreement for a football game between their programs to be played on a Saturday some eight years later. Accordingly, CU would pay NDSU $700,000 to come to Folsom Field.

Instead, the Buffaloes and Bison will finally meet in a nationally televised prime-time game on Thursday, to please ESPN. If the schedule were being crafted through a crystal ball, this probably isn’t the matchup CU would have wanted to open the second season of the Deion Sanders experiment, given how things fell apart in Year 1. (The bookmakers have the Buffs as 9.5-point favorites in the game.)

Much has changed since the opponents first signed on the dotted line — a combined five new head coaches between the schools and a new conference for CU, which left the Pac-12 for the Big 12 — though some important things remain the same. The signings of the game agreement, ADs Rick George and Matt Larsen, are still with CU and NDSU, respectively. North Dakota State remains one of the top FCS football programs in the country, with a history of ruining the non-conference home schedules of their bigger, wealthier hosts. The Bison have won five of their last six road games against FBS opponents, including a 23-21 stunner against a No. 13-ranked Iowa team in 2016. And that success, in turn, has made the school’s chances of an upset increasingly difficult.

In a phone interview, Larsen said that despite all this, CU made no attempt to wiggle out of this year’s home opener. “I have a lot of respect for that,” said Larsen, who estimates that about 7,000 NDSU fans will make the 900-mile trek from Fargo, N.D., to Boulder, Colo.

In 2016, NDSU was already struggling to find willing FBS schools to pay it guaranteed away games after winning three straight FCS championships. Fans in Fargo were clamoring for the school to apply for membership in college football’s top division, a possibility that was included in the terms of the CU game. According to a copy of the contract obtained through a public records request, NDSU would have seen its salary double to $1.4 million if it had joined the FBS before the game.

That didn’t happen, and financially the game has only declined in value: The $700,000 investment from eight years ago now has a purchasing power of $534,622, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator.

On the other hand, there was no expectation that the head coach of the opposing team, NDSU, would be someone with the star status of Sanders, who was coaching high school players in Texas at the time.

“So it’s not an extra $700,000, but it is (extra) national exposure,” Larsen said, a compromise he’s happy to make. (Earlier this year, CU agreed to increase NDSU’s payment to $740,000 to offset the extra attendance costs incurred by moving the game to Thursday.)

Barring NDSU moving up a subdivision, Thursday’s game could be one of the last of its kind for the program. The team’s next scheduled FBS game is a 2028 contest at Oregon, which was contracted in 2015 and originally set to be played in 2020. (NDSU will receive $650,000 for that game.)

For financial reasons, more and more FCS schools have opted to play two FBS away games each year, further narrowing the field of opponents. And now that the College Football Playoff has expanded to a 12-team format this season, there’s more incentive for power conference members to schedule competitive games against each other early in the season, rather than trying to go undefeated playing non-FBS opponents.

“I hope it doesn’t get to the point where some of these FBS schools decide not to play FCS anymore,” Larsen said.

By many metrics, even off the field, North Dakota State has already closed the gap in the subdivisions.

For fiscal year 2023, NDSU reported $6.4 million in total football operating revenue, which was more than at least 20 FBS schools, including Connecticut and Houston. That same fiscal year, the Bison earned more from football ticket sales ($3.72 million) than 42% of public FBS schools, according to Sporty‘s database of financial information about college sports.

The school has spent $110 million on athletic facility projects over the past 12 years, including a $54 million football practice facility set to open in 2022. Larsen notes that unlike most FCS programs, his school is “fully funded.” Alston and the costs of participating in the competitions for its athletes.

“I think our football team can compete and hold its own on any given Saturday, but there’s a lot more to it than that,” Larsen said. “If we were to go to FBS right now, none of us would know what the rules are. There’s probably a lot more questions than answers. I think we’ve said all along that we want to play at the highest level possible, and that makes sense.”

Larsen often refers to the Bison as an FBS program that wears FCS apparel, and it’s arguable that offering affordable fashion is the most logical choice going forward.

“I feel better about where we are right now than most (FBS) programs outside of your Power Four conferences,” Larsen said.

In recent years, North Dakota State has increasingly relied on playing neutral-site “destination games” against other FCS schools for the season opener. Last year, the Bison opened their season with a game against Eastern Washington at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis. Next year, they’ll open their season with back-to-back games against The Citadel in Charleston, S.C., and Tennessee State in Nashville.

Meanwhile, NDSU’s next opening is just three years away, in 2027, a blink of an eye in the chronometry of football game scheduling. So far, there have been no FBS candidates.

“Philosophically, we want to play those games,” Larsen said. “Our deputy AD will literally reach out to every FBS program that has a common open date to inquire, and it’s just been a challenge. So if there are readers interested, we’re certainly open to it.”