The ISU football team released its finalized 2011 non-conference football schedule Monday morning.

The schedule will open with a home game against Northern Iowa on Sept. 3, the first time the Cyclones will open on a Saturday after five seasons of opening on the Thursday before Labor day.

“Although the Thursday night opener has been very successful and popular with our student body and the majority of our fans, we feel pushing the opener back to Saturday night in 2011 is an opportunity to show those fans that struggle making a Thursday night game that we are trying to accommodate their needs as well,” said ISU Director of Athletics Jaime Pollard in a news release Monday.

The Cyclones’ next game will be against the rival Iowa Hawkeyes, meaning that the Cy-Hawk rivalry will remain in tact for at least one more season.

With both the landscapes of the Big 12 and Big Ten changing throughout the summer, the future of the game was left in limbo.

The Cyclones will close non-conference play on Sept. 17 with a game at the University of Connecticut.

In the wake of NCAA conference realignment throughout the summer, the Big 12 Conference was left with 10 member teams. With just 10 teams, the conference’s current scheduling format would not work and the conference has reportedly chosen to go to a round-robin, nine-game schedule in football and an 18-game, double round-robin format in basketball.

The nine-game conference schedule means that the Cyclones can only schedule three non-conference games.

Prior to Monday, a road game was scheduled for 2011 against Utah, which will face the Cyclones in Jack Trice Stadium on Oct. 9 of this season.

“Moving to a nine-game conference schedule in the Big 12 required us to drop a non-league game. Utah was in a similar position with its move to the Pac-10 so we’ve agreed to drop the 2011 game with the Utes,” Pollard said in the statement.

The announcement also said that the Big 12 hopes to have its conference schedules finalized later this week.