FARGO — At some point, North Dakota State will add another time zone to its football schedule and this one may push the memory in trying to recall it. Getting accepted into the Mountain West Conference for football also means the Bison will play in the Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zone.
That’s Honolulu, home to the University of Hawaii.
The Mountain West isn’t expected to release its schedule until around the end of the month, and it’s uncertain in a 10-team league that plays eight conference games if the Bison will even play the Rainbow Warriors next fall, but at some point NDSU will embark on its longest ever football flight.
And when that happens, it’s possible NDSU would be in line to have a bye week following the trip. But that is by no means a certainty or any sort of conference stipulation.
“The travel relief is something we try to take a look at when we’re building the schedule,” said John Sullivan, associate commissioner for the Mountain West who handles the scheduling. “But truly we’re looking at it holistically with all schools.”
The league does have a condition that if a school is scheduled for a game in Honolulu, it will also be allowed to start its season in “Week Zero,” which in this case is Saturday, Aug. 22. That in theory could build in another bye week during the season.
Of the seven teams that traveled to Hawaii last season, four had a bye the following week while Wyoming played its last regular season game at Clarence T. Ching Complex. Utah State, on the other hand, not only played at Hawaii on a Saturday, but followed that with a Friday home game against San Jose State, which it won 30-25.
San Diego State defeated Boise State 17-7 the week after its Hawaii trip. Utah State, San Diego State and Boise are leaving the Mountain West for the Pac-12 Conference next season.
“We always try to balance out that when you go to Hawaii to have a home game on either side of that, the requisite days of rest,” said Mountain West commissioner Gloria Nevarez. “And in a non-conference example, not having a long non-conference trip back up against your Hawaii trip, some of those basic travel days of rest parameters that we have.”
Hawaii has been a football-only member of the Mountain West since 2012, but will join the league in all sports beginning next fall. That change in status will also mean a change in the financial model of the school, which previously paid for the charter flights of other league schools to fly to Hawaii.
No longer. The charter from Fargo to Honolulu will be on NDSU’s own dime. Last year’s Mountain West was all western-based, but the addition of Northern Illinois and NDSU brings the Central time zone into the league for the first time since the conference originated in 1999.
“We’ve always been an airplane league,” Nevarez said. “We just don’t have that concentration of FBS schools in the western region like they do on the East Coast.”
NDSU is no stranger to long trips. Last year, the Bison played at The Citadel in Charleston, S.C., and Tennessee State in Nashville. They played at East Tennessee State in 2024, at Arizona in 2022 and at Towson University (Md.) in 2021.
Depending on the non-conference schedule, this fall could rival the 2006 season when NDSU was at Ball State (Ind.), Georgia Southern, Stephen F. Austin (Texas), Southern Utah and California Davis. Games were held in all four time zones that season. Hawaii will add another one to that list.
Jeff Kolpack, the son of a reporter and an English teacher, and the brother of a reporter, worked at the Jamestown Sun, Bismarck Tribune and since 1990 The Forum, where he’s covered North Dakota State athletics since 1995. He has covered all 10 of NDSU’s Division I FCS national football titles and has written four books: “Horns Up,” “North Dakota Tough,” “Covid Kids” and “They Caught Them Sleeping: How Dot Reinvented the Pretzel.” He is also the radio host of “The Golf Show with Jeff Kolpack” April through August.