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Last Friday, Yahoo Sports reporter Ross Dellenger dropped an FCS college football bombshell, reporting that North Dakota State and the Mountain West Conference were in serious dialogue about the Bison joining the league as a football-only member starting in 2026. According to Dellenger, North Dakota State and the conference had been in discussions for over a year, with the Bison expected to pay a substantial entry fee to join the league. 

As we’ve come to know all-too-well, college football moves at warp speed. Within 72 hours, the Mountain West made it official by sending out an official announcement on its social accounts. North Dakota State will be the tenth member of the new-look Mountain West.

This immediately becomes a landmark moment in FCS football history—one that sees the division’s most dominant football program make the leap to the FBS ranks. Immediately upon hearing the news, my mind went a million directions.

On the surface, this would be extremely cool. I’d love to watch the Bison play at a higher level. 

I wonder what happens to the epic North Dakota State-South Dakota State rivalry moving forward?

Could the Fargodome become a House of Horrors for FBS teams as it did at the FCS-level?

After I sat with the news for a while, I thought more about the demands of FBS versus FCS football, the challenges that might come with this move, and racked my brain for comparable programs that also made the FCS-to-FBS jump in the last decade or so.

While there’s no way to predict just how this might go for North Dakota State, two possible outcomes came to mind: the James Madison Boom and the Georgia Southern Bust. 

One path leads to the 12-team College Football Playoff and G5 darling status; the other leads to becoming “just another G5 team” and a relic of what you once were.

North Dakota State didn’t just dominate the FCS ranks; the Bison became the Boogeymen. 

No FCS program has claimed more national championships than North Dakota State football, having won 10 of 14 FCS titles from 2011-2024. Throughout that historic run, the Bison went on a ridiculous five-peat from 2011-2015 and put a bow on their decade of dominance with a three-peat from 2017-2019. North Dakota State went on to win its ninth national title in January 2022, and after a two-year titleless drought, hoisted the trophy again with a win in the 2024 season.

Dating back to North Dakota State’s time at the Division II level, the Bison have had just four head coaches (Craig Bohl, Chris Klieman, Matt Entz, and Tim Polasek) and have churned out an eye-watering amount of NFL talent for a non-FBS football program. Notable North Dakota State NFL alums include the likes of quarterbacks Carson Wentz and Trey Lance, offensive linemen Cody Mauch and Grey Zabel, among many others.

And yet, somehow, the numbers don’t seem to do the North Dakota State football program justice. Throughout the Bison’s FCS heyday, the Fargodome—an 18,700-seat indoor stadium—morphed into the Game of Thrones equivalent of The Wall, a 700-foot-tall, 300-mile-long, and 300-foot-thick structure made of ice, stone, and earth designed to separate the Seven Kingdoms from the far north. The stadium itself became as intimidating as the teams on the field. Opponents feared it. Missouri Valley Conference foes ran from it. Visitors rarely entered and escaped alive.

The unheralded level of dominance, continuity with coaches, amount of NFL talent, and a home stadium with almost myth-like qualities resulted in Bison fans and onlookers reciting the same five-word phrase after what felt like every football season: Death, taxes, and NDSU football.

To better understand the potential James Madison Boom trajectory for North Dakota State, it’s important to acknowledge just how good the Dukes were at the FCS level. 

James Madison wasn’t just a good FCS program—it was one that stared the North Dakota State dynasty in the face and refused to flinch. In the six seasons before moving to the FBS, the Dukes went 73-11, won one national title in 2016, had a pair of national runner-up and semifinal finishes, and owned the Colonial Athletic Conference by winning or sharing the conference title in five of six seasons. The Dukes were so good, ESPN’s College GameDay visited Harrisonburg twice while they were still an FCS program. 

The throughline between James Madison and North Dakota State runs through 2016, when the Dukes went into the Fargodome and snapped the Bison’s 22-game playoff win streak in an epic 27-17 win that gave credence to what the James Madison football program had become. 

Since making the jump to the FBS ranks, James Madison has had a meteoric rise to the upper crust of the sport, due in large part to its hidden gem coaching hires. Newly crowned 2025 national champion head coach Curt Cignetti famously won big at James Madison, compiling a 41-8 record as he ushered the program from the FCS ranks to Conference USA. Then came now-UCLA head coach Bob Chesney, who kept the train rolling, notably leading the Dukes to the 2025 College Football Playoff, becoming the first former FCS school to make the CFP.

In short order, James Madison went from FCS power to FBS success story. If it sounds like something out of a fairy tale, well, you’re not too far off. Considering the speed with which James Madison found major success, it’s no wonder a team like North Dakota State, which was far more dominant at the FCS level, thinks it can do the same.

To be clear, James Madison is an outlier. And for every rapid success story like James Madison, there are many others mimic the trajectory of Georgia Southern.

Long before North Dakota State’s reign of terror, Georgia Southern was the original FCS dynasty. Between 1985 and 2000, the Eagles won six national titles under legendary coaches like Erik Russell and Paul Johnson, utilizing a nasty triple option scheme that felt less like football and more like a religious experience. Georgia Southern was known for taking under-recruited athletes and making mincemeat out of opposing defenses, with the most famous example coming in 2013, when the Eagles beat Florida in The Swamp without completing a single pass. 

In 2014, Georgia Southern moved to the FBS ranks. And while the program experienced initial highs (like winning the Sun Belt in 2018), it slowly slipped into an identity crisis after moving away from its triple option roots. Tyson Summers famously moved the program away from the triple option in an attempt to modernize how the Eagles operated and experienced bad results. Chad Lunsford and Clay Helton later came in, but since 2020, Georgia Southern has won eight games just twice and now feels like a program that is adrift from its FCS dominance.

For over a decade, the world order of the FCS football ranks felt simple: Death, taxes, and NDSU football. But by trading in FCS dominance for the unknown of the Mountain West and the FBS, we might finally get the answer to whether the Bison will go the way of James Madison or Georgia Southern.

Will the Bison stick to their roots of playing a violent brand of A-gap, power-heavy football? Or will a tougher level of competition force North Dakota State to establish a new program identity, and potentially lose a part of what made them a dynasty in the first place? 

No one can say for certain. And much like both James Madison and Georgia Southern, we might not know for quite some time. 

With Valentine's Day around the corner, we took a look at the 2025 storylines we all secretly loved. Whether scrappy teams that held things together with gum and chicken wire, coaches who turned programs around overnight, or the moments that didn't make national headlines, we talk through the things that got our hearts pumping. Think Wisconsin winning games with their punter as the leading passer, Houston quietly going 10-3, Arch Manning actually getting better when pundits left him for dead, and much more.

In this episode, we share our own picks before opening it up to the Verballerhood, whose submissions cover everything from Kenny Dillingham staying at Arizona State to the absurdity of Lane Kiffin's move to LSU, Arkansas fans learning to love heartbreak, Indiana fans debating whether to protect their hearts or go all in on Curt Cignetti, and much more. Plus, a brief Super Bowl debrief, a Timothée Chalamet conversation, and the debut of Dan's bucket of wrenches.

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