Ball State is the only FBS team with a Week 1 bye: Here’s why

The Cardinals fall victim to conference realignment and don’t debut their 2024 season until Sept. 7.

Welcome to game week!

It’s Week 1 of the college football season and every FBS team is set to take the field Labor Day weekend in a five-day installment running from Thursday to Monday. Well, not every FBS team. There’s one exception.

The Ball State Cardinals are the only team in the FBS with a Week 1 bye week, and that includes the six teams involved in Week 0 action on Saturday, Aug. 24. Ball State must delay the anticipation another week to Saturday, Sept. 7 when the Cardinals host Missouri State of the FCS in Muncie, IN.

How did Ball State get left out of the equation entirely?

The Cardinals previously had Saturday, Aug. 31 reserved on their calendar as their 2024 opener vs. Army. However, conference realignment got in the way. Last October, the Black Knights ditched their independent ways to join the American Athletic Conference. Belonging to AAC membership, Army needed to clear eight of its 12 non-conference matchups in order to add room for a full conference schedule. In December, Ball State became a casualty of Army’s updated schedule edits, and the Cardinals were forced to find a fourth and final non-conference opponent for 2024.

Around the same time Army dropped Ball State, Vanderbilt made its own schedule tweaks and axed a Sept. 14 home game vs. SMU from the schedule. Although the Mustangs also changed conference affiliations like Army, this move was not directly related to SMU’s transition from the AAC to the ACC. SMU ultimately replaced the Vanderbilt game with a Week 0 contest at Nevada, which the Mustangs won 29-24 last Saturday in a wild fourth quarter comeback.

Thus, with an open date on each of their schedules, the incomplete puzzle pieces of Vanderbilt and Ball State became the perfect match for each other, and their meeting in Nashville transpires Oct. 19 at 7 p.m. ET. This matchup is atypically late in the season for a MAC non-conference game, but the MAC successfully worked around Ball State’s unorthodox schedule, and the Cardinals will launch conference play Sept. 21 at Central Michigan.

But for now, while 133 fanbases are grilling barbecue at tailgates, organizing watch parties, and witnessing their teams storm out of the tunnel and onto the gridiron for that highly-anticipated Week 1 kickoff, Ball State simply must wait.

The Cardinals 2024 campaign officially commences in Week 2 on Sept. 7.