Question: I'm hoping to restore a backup from SQL Server 2008 into a Sql Server 2005 instance. Is there a way to have Sql 2008 back up in a format that 2005 will understand?

Answer: 
No, the formats are incompatible. In order to go backward you will need to script out your database and create it via script in the older version.

Note that you could run into incompatabilities due to new features and datatypes in SQL 2008 that weren't available in 2005.
You can use a tool like Talend to migrate your tables. It has a GUI interface and can work with SQL Server 2008/2005/2000 and is OSS/Free

<http://www.talend.com>