Should North Dakota State football start looking at transition to FBS?

How much winning does it take for a school to finally move up? North Dakota State football begs us to ask this question with every year of FCS dominance.

In their quarterfinal encounter against No. 8 Colgate in the NCAA Division I playoffs, FCS powerhouse North Dakota State extended its winning streak to 13 games in a row. But it wasn’t just that the Bison beat the Raiders in their Saturday encounter at the Fargodome, but how thoroughly deconstructed NDSU left their visitors by the end of the game.

The 35-0 shutout of Colgate, coupled with the results of the other quarterfinal pairings and the rest of the FCS season in general, showed unequivocally that North Dakota State is once again the team to beat as they march toward a sixth national championship in seven years.

Even that one anomaly in the bunch, the 2016 crown ceded to James Madison, is an aberration in an eight-year streak where the Bison have gone 110-8 between the first national championship season in 2011 and the quarterfinal blowout of Colgate.

But what if their semifinal opponent, a South Dakota State team that has won two of their past four games against their Dakota Marker rivals, should manage to upset the Bison? It would still be a season where North Dakota State reached the final four for an eighth straight year after getting bounced in the 2010 quarterfinals by eventual champion Eastern Washington.

North Dakota State has moved up a level before

What makes this run of dominance all the more impressive is that, until 2004, North Dakota State was a longtime Division II school. In a 26-year stretch between 1965 and 1990, the Bison won eight national titles at the Division II level. That included five out of the eight championships awarded between 1983 and 1990. Yet it took 14 more years before the athletic department in Fargo opted to move all of its programs up to Division I.

For the Bison, that meant a move to the FCS. Craig Bohl helped guide North Dakota State through the transition in 2004 after taking the head coaching job a year earlier. Within seven years, the Bison reached the playoff and made the quarterfinals. And in just their eighth season of FCS play, the Bison claimed their first national title over Sam Houston State.

Since the first title season in 2011, North Dakota State won five in a row before James Madison finally broke the Bison spell in the Division I playoff in 2016. While the FBS transitioned from the BCS to the College Football Playoff, a playoff that has evolved since the late 1970s was suddenly the near-exclusive domain of a team that just kept churning out championship seasons. That was as true under Bohl as it has been under his successor, Chris Klieman.

After regaining the crown as the top team in the country in 2017, North Dakota State came into 2018 motivated to completely dominate their competition. With no FBS team willing to take on the Bison this year, they instead have embarked on a run of 13 straight victories that was impressive especially because only Northern Iowa managed to score more than 17 points on the NDSU defense.

South Dakota State, their semifinal opponent, was one team that managed 17 points in a 21-17 loss. That was the only time that anybody came within 10 points of North Dakota State on the scoreboard this year. Their first two playoff victories have come by a combined 87-10 scoreline.

In a time when many are transitioning, why does NDSU stay in the FCS?

Over the past decade, there has been a relative exodus of teams moving from the FCS to the FBS. It has been part of a broader trend of schools transitioning upward that began in the early 1990s but really took off in 2012. Since four teams made the climb that year, there have been seven more teams that transitioned up — and one, Idaho, that transitioned back down after previously moving up from the I-AA ranks in 1996.

We have seen dominant teams make the climb in the past, and maintain a level of excellence while doing so. So there is precedent for North Dakota State to make a jump if they so choose.

Marshall went from a I-AA national championship to the MAC title the next year, thanks to stars like Randy Moss and Chad Pennington. Appalachian State, North Dakota State before the Bison after winning three national titles in a row between 2005 and 2007, just claimed the inaugural Sun Belt championship game and their third straight share of the conference crown.

Then there is the case of Boise State, the perennial Group of Five contender with three Fiesta Bowl victories to their name. The Broncos moved up from their I-AA perch in 1996 among the first big wave that also brought in the Vandals, UAB, and UCF. While their Gem State rivals already dropped back down to join the Big Sky when they were unable to find a conference partner in the FBS, Boise State has launched to nationwide prominence thanks to their novel blue turf and their run of successes.

There is no reason why North Dakota State couldn’t do the same. A stadium that tops out at 19,000-seat capacity is something of an impediment, but the Bison have the demand to justify either a renovation and expansion project or construction of a new football-specific venue (losing the noise potential of the Fargodome would be a major hit to home-field advantage, regardless of how many more seats might be filled, but a new venue could be designed as another indoor site at larger scale).

After winning six straight games against FBS opponents, nobody is willing to even give the Bison a chance any more. While plenty of Group of Five teams have experience the phenomenon of getting ducked by Power Five opponents, North Dakota State became a team to be feared by any FBS team.

So why not move up at this point? After a while, kicking sand in the face of smaller kids in the sandbox has to start getting old. How many more championships to the Bison need to win against overmatched fields of opponents before they finally test themselves on a more consistent basis?

North Dakota State has the recruiting and especially the development infrastructure in place to make the Bison a competitive team in a league like the Mountain West or the American Athletic Conference. They have a coaching staff and a coaching philosophy that suits the type of talent that opts to matriculate in Fargo, and that is designed to transcend any single coach.

Now they just need the confidence to take a chance like they did in 2004, and a willing conference partner in an era when independence is not an option for FBS neophytes looking to maintain FCS dominance. Someone should give North Dakota State a chance, and the Bison should seize that opportunity.