FARGO, N.D. (AP) — North Dakota State's road to the highest level of college football was paved by an unprecedented run of success, with 10 national championships serving as sparkling souvenirs from a two-decade stay in the Championship Subdivision.
That exit sign for the Bowl Subdivision came into view through a rare and bitter taste of failure.
The Bison rumbled last year into the FCS playoffs with the top seed, a first-round bye and an unbeaten record.
Then came Dec. 6 and the fateful game against Illinois State. The Redbirds, a conference rival, rallied three times from two-touchdown deficits for a one-point victory at the Fargodome. The 19,000-seat stadium was about half full for the thriller.
“That was the point in time for me when I said, ‘We’ve got to get this done,'” athletic director Matt Larsen recalled. “We were really close already. I remember thinking to myself, ‘If we don’t make this move, this might be the norm.' I think our fan base is as passionate as they've always been, but they wanted a new challenge. This provides that new energy and new competition.”
The latest era for this powerhouse on the prairie starts on Saturday when North Dakota State hosts Jacksonville State in its first game as an FBS program. The Bison then make their Mountain West debut on Sept. 12 at Air Force, marking yet another turn on the sport's carousel of conference realignment. Sacramento State is also moving up to the FBS this season.
“I always knew it could happen, but I never was really thinking about it,” linebacker Donovan Woolen said. “To play better games against better competition is going to be a lot more fun. To be able to test our abilities and see our fullest potential of what we can do as players and as a team, I think we’re ready for it.”
After winning three national championships (1965, 1968, 1969) in what was then the NCAA's College Division, the Bison won five more Division II titles (1983, 1985, 1986, 1988 and 1990) after the original lower tier was divided into two. The first big move came in 2004 to the FCS, where attention-grabbing wins over Big Ten and Big 12 opponents laid the groundwork for those record 10 championships over a stunning 14-year span that included four different head coaches.
The Bison went 9-5 against FBS foes, with four of those losses coming by a combined 12 points, and counted Iowa, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State and Minnesota — twice — as victims of their stampede. The program's all-time record in playoff games is 86-20, including a jaw-dropping 51-7 in the FCS tournament.
“There’s been murmurs and all that for probably five years now, but to finally make that jump, it’s pretty cool to see and I’m excited for the guys back at Fargo,” said Seattle Seahawks left guard Grey Zabel, who was a first-round draft pick out of North Dakota State in 2025 and promptly got a Super Bowl ring out of his rookie season. “They've got the support staff. They've got the coaching staff. They've got the community, the fans, the players, the talent. It’s just a matter of putting in the hard work and having the right attitude, effort and mentality.”
Playing in the biggest city in a state without a pro team, the Bison have naturally become a regional draw boasting a proud network of supporters. Tom Blattner, a 1996 alumnus, gave in 2021 with his wife through their foundation a $15 million gift toward the $54 million indoor facility that also allows the soccer, baseball, softball and golf teams to practice in the dead of winter.
Fargo is a growing city of more than 125,000 people with a metropolitan area — including Moorhead, Minnesota — that's about double that, but a midsize market has its financial limits. The university enrolled close to 12,000 students last fall, including about 9,700 undergraduates, more than only Wyoming and Air Force in the Mountain West.
NDSU's $5 million reclassification fee to the NCAA and $12.5 million entry fee to the Mountain West were privately funded, so some donors will undoubtedly be tapped out for a while. The football program added 22 scholarships in the move to the FBS, and the increased travel and other competitive upgrades has roughly doubled the operating budget, Larsen said, from 2025 expenses of about $8 million.
As long as the College Football Playoff includes a spot for the Group of Six conferences that comprise the underbelly of the Power Four-driven FBS, the Bison will have a big prize to pursue even if their days of winning national championships with regularity are all but done.
“To be able to compete year in and year out for a conference championship, to me that's a signifier that we've built a competitive program. If you're doing well in the Mountain West, that means you're doing well across the Group of Six as well,” Larsen said. “We don't want to just go. We want to go compete right away.”
The buzz around the football facilities has been palpable this summer, perhaps no stronger than when players began to get their hands on the latest edition of the popular EA Sports video game, College Football, which for the first time includes North Dakota State. Now they can relax at home after practice and pick the Bison to control instead of Alabama or Ohio State.
“To play as yourself in a game, that’s something every little kid wants to do when they grow up,” Woolen said.
North Dakota State was joined on its jump to the FCS by South Dakota State, which beat the Bison in the 2022 national championship game and won it all again in 2023. North Dakota and South Dakota eventually moved up from Division II as well.
The Bison are open to playing regional schools in the future, Larsen said, but that can't be an annual event with a nonconference schedule that has room for only FCS game. North Dakota State fans seeking matchups with the neighbors to the north and south will probably have to settle for other sports.
Northern Illinois, another one of the three newcomers to Mountain West football this season, could become a rival as the only other Central Time Zone team in the league from a part of the country the Bison try to recruit hard. Wyoming, where current head coach Tim Polasek was recently the offensive coordinator under Craig Bohl, a former North Dakota State head coach, is another candidate to stoke the competitive fire.
For now, Bison fans have some fun road trips to look forward to, with two games in Northern California, one in Las Vegas and one in, yes, Honolulu.
“There's a lot of excitement around the community for sure," wide receiver and kick returner Jackson Williams said.
Winning never gets old to coaches or players, but all those blowouts of teams in the bottom half of the top-heavy Missouri Valley Football Conference weren't doing much for the fan base. Plus, taking home that many trophies in such a short amount of time can create an anticlimactic feeling.
“I think it’s bittersweet, to sum it up, but I do think with where college football is headed there was no other decision to be made,” Polasek said. “We’re excited to be moving up, and the time was right. It's just an opportunity we couldn’t pass up.”
___
AP Sports Writers Andrew Destin in Renton, Wash., and Steve Megargee in Green Bay, Wis., contributed to this report.
___
Sign up for Top 25 poll alerts here, visit the Top 25 here and see AP’s full college football coverage here.
