The Mountain West is in serious dialogue to add FCS powerhouse North Dakota State as a football-only member starting this coming season

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FinnGopher said:
Then don't go until you can grow up in all sports.
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Either you're trolling like an idiot, or you don't realize that the Summit, the MWC and the B1G are all at the same level in sports other than football. The FBS/FCS split is for football only. So there is no "growing up." They are simply staying in a conference in their other sports that is more conducive to travel expenses. Having to send the baseball team to Hawaii might be a bit more than they want to spend.
 

everybody knows my name said:
I appreciate your perspective and I respect your opinion, but the Fargo/Moorhead metro is about 275,000 and growing rapidly. Industry and commerce are bursting; unemployment is virtually nil. The entire metro is rabid Bison country, as is all of SE North Dakota and the greater part of west central Minnesota.

There's no place in North America better positioned to graduate into a major market.
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Gopherchase said:
Perhaps they have been saving their bullets, not making investments in the current stadium in anticipation of needing to replace it so why throw good money after bad save it for the new one?
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They've tried to upgrade the Fargodome very recently and the city's voters have said "no."
 

everybody knows my name said:
I'm speaking to you as someone who hates NDSU and its fans, but who's spent decades living among them. Familiarity breeds contempt. I'm not wishing for this; I'm telling you that the school aspires to move up, they've been doing it, they plan to keep doing it, and I expect it to continue.

Everybody acts like I'm talking about tomorrow. How long were they FCS? 22 years. It's a long game. The state is growing, the metro area is growing, and the school is growing. There are more alumni and there's more money every year. The Fargodome opened in 1992, so it's already 33 years old. They won't play in a 19,000 seat stadium forever. TCU plays in a 53,000 seat stadium. I'd be surprised if, as an FBS school, NDSU can't match that 10-20 years from now.
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The school isn't really growing and enrollment is down from all time highs and demographic trends aren't favorable. ND Board of Higher Ed is notoriously cheap. TCU and NDSU aren't great comparables.
 





swede2 said:
The school isn't really growing and enrollment is down from all time highs and demographic trends aren't favorable. ND Board of Higher Ed is notoriously cheap. TCU and NDSU aren't great comparables.
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This is true. As I understand it, NDSU's enrollment is pretty stagnant, while UND, which is the larger school, has been growing. I drove through both campuses this summer, and I was surprised at how nice UND's campus is these days. Granted, the weather at both schools is absolutely horrible in the winter.

Athletically though, UND's hockey team consumes so much of their funding, and pretty much all of their booster dollars. I don't know if they could ever make this jump. SDSU, maybe. USD is probably far too small.
 

North Dakota State’s long-awaited, yet sudden, FBS move.​

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7036568/2026/02/10/north-dakota-state-fbs-until-saturday/

Stampede: NDSU finally moves up, all of a sudden​

Longtime FCS mega-dynasty North Dakota State is officially moving up to the FBS, joining the remodeled Mountain West … and doing it this season.

NDSU won its 10th FCS title in 2024. So the move was long-anticipated, to say the least. Two examples:

  • Three years ago, our Chris Vannini reported on what’d already been a roughly decade-long movement in Fargo (and throughout college football) to see what the Bison could do at the top level. All the while, the school was investing in its football facilities.
  • On the biggest NDSU message board, a single discussion thread about the potential FBS move was ongoing for almost 12 straight years, since September 2014. “We already dominated this stage,” wrote one NDSU fan 160 months ago. “Time to pump it up.”
There’s little surprise they were so eager. At that point in 2014, the Bison were cruising toward their fourth straight FCS title and had just beaten FBS’ Iowa State, at which point I edited this little post advising Power 5 teams to stop playing NDSU. (I then updated it in 2016 after Iowa failed to heed.)

Meanwhile in 2014, FBS’ Sun Belt had just added Appalachian State and Georgia Southern, former FCS dynasties that’d respectively beaten Michigan and Florida along the way. In the 2010s, daydreaming about the Bison getting that kind of stage in the MAC felt limiting. In some of those years, NDSU could’ve won the Big Ten West.

Still, 2026’s timing feels especially strategic, with the Mountain West having lost Boise State and several of its second-tier names to the new Pac-12. It’s easy to imagine NDSU taking over this Boise-free conference, perhaps even as quickly as Southern, App State and then JMU claimed the Sun Belt. The MWC is also adding the admittedly non-mountainous Northern Illinois, a team well within NDSU’s familiar travel range.

(Speaking of travel, one sneaky contributor to NDSU’s success: It might have college sports’ most underrated airport situation. Direct flights from recruiting hotbeds like Atlanta, Dallas and Orlando land across the street from the Fargodome.)

Also, the recently expanded Playoff means the Boise-less MWC need a marquee contender who can compete for an autobid with UNLV and the best teams from other G6 leagues. From Fargo news site InForum:

“The Mountain West was afraid of adding FCS schools and then having the rules change to exclude them before they’d completed their transition. ‘That has changed, that issue no longer exists,’ (MWC commissioner Gloria Nevarez) said.”
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everybody knows my name said:
I'm speaking to you as someone who hates NDSU and its fans, but who's spent decades living among them. Familiarity breeds contempt. I'm not wishing for this; I'm telling you that the school aspires to move up, they've been doing it, they plan to keep doing it, and I expect it to continue.

Everybody acts like I'm talking about tomorrow. How long were they FCS? 22 years. It's a long game. The state is growing, the metro area is growing, and the school is growing. There are more alumni and there's more money every year. The Fargodome opened in 1992, so it's already 33 years old. They won't play in a 19,000 seat stadium forever. TCU plays in a 53,000 seat stadium. I'd be surprised if, as an FBS school, NDSU can't match that 10-20 years from now.
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So fair enough. You are predicting the future. But, you have mentioned a couple times that it is a rabid fan base. What am I missing if they typically fall 3K or more short of selling out their 19K stadium now? By percentage, that seems pretty similar to Gopher football ticket sales in a 51K stadium (if not behind). Shouldn't a rabid fan base regularly sell out a home stadium?
 

Schnauzer said:
So fair enough. You are predicting the future. But, you have mentioned a couple times that it is a rabid fan base. What am I missing if they typically fall 3K or more short of selling out their 19K stadium now? By percentage, that seems pretty similar to Gopher football ticket sales in a 51K stadium (if not behind). Shouldn't a rabid fan base regularly sell out a home stadium?
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Their fan base has grown increasingly apathetic over the past decade or so. I know personally a number of people who dropped their season tickets because watching them pound the likes of Murray State just wasn't much fun.

And interestingly enough, playoff games often didn't sell out even during the peak interest if they conflicted with harvest or hunting season.
 

disco said:
Their fan base has grown increasingly apathetic over the past decade or so. I know personally a number of people who dropped their season tickets because watching them pound the likes of Murray State just wasn't much fun.

And interestingly enough, playoff games often didn't sell out even during the peak interest if they conflicted with harvest or hunting season.
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What a weird phenomenon. Is there another college football fan base that grew tired of winning? If that really is the case, the new decade should have peaked some renewed interest. While NDSU dominated FCS and the MVFC from 2010 to 2019, since 2020, NDSU has only won 2 of 6 national championships, and 2 outright and 1 shared MVFC conference title. SDSU, Montana St and maybe even Montana have caught NDSU in competitiveness and resources. USD and even UND have closed the gap. Bison wins weren't as inevitable as they were in the first half of the last decade as peer schools poured the same kind of resources into their FB programs.

I'm sure there will be a spike in interest in NDSU football but I would argue that for the Bison, the fanbase is not particularly large and not particularly rabid but that there is a small subset of rabid fans. Frankly, the best fans in FCS are at Montana St and particularly Montana. The Griz fans sellout a 25,000 seat stadium game after game, year after year, for pretty disappointing results. We'll see how rabid of fanbase it is two or three years from now when instead of pounding Northern Iowa, they're licking Wyoming and playing in the New Mexico Bowl against Georgia Southern. Or, if its competition they want, losing to UTEP or someone equally unmemorable.
 



swede2 said:
What a weird phenomenon. Is there another college football fan base that grew tired of winning? If that really is the case, the new decade should have peaked some renewed interest. While NDSU dominated FCS and the MVFC from 2010 to 2019, since 2020, NDSU has only won 2 of 6 national championships, and 2 outright and 1 shared MVFC conference title. SDSU, Montana St and maybe even Montana have caught NDSU in competitiveness and resources. USD and even UND have closed the gap. Bison wins weren't as inevitable as they were in the first half of the last decade as peer schools poured the same kind of resources into their FB programs.

I'm sure there will be a spike in interest in NDSU football but I would argue that for the Bison, the fanbase is not particularly large and not particularly rabid but that there is a small subset of rabid fans. Frankly, the best fans in FCS are at Montana St and particularly Montana. The Griz fans sellout a 25,000 seat stadium game after game, year after year, for pretty disappointing results. We'll see how rabid of fanbase it is two or three years from now when instead of pounding Northern Iowa, they're licking Wyoming and playing in the New Mexico Bowl against Georgia Southern. Or, if its competition they want, losing to UTEP or someone equally unmemorable.
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I'm not positive, but I think there were some other things. NDSU games were a massive tailgating party for years, and I think they've really cracked down on it in the last decade or so. I know there have been a lot of complaints about the dome, and ticket prices for the overall experience.

A lot of the fan base comes from outside FM and they may be tired of traveling hours for uncompetitive football, and in the late season (remember FCS plays well into December - FBS does not) weather can be a factor.

And honestly, it's like anything else. People can watch on their 85 inch TV, flip between games, eat their own food and drink their own beer. Not to mention, Fargo has grown a lot, and with that comes other entertainment options that are competing for a finite amount of disposable entertainment money. It's a reason I've always said that the Gophers aren't going to draw like an Alabama. It's not because "its a pro town" it's because there are a lot of entertainment options.

You mention Montana/MSU. I watched some of those games this year, and it looks like an AWESOME experience. I've been to NDSU games. It's not the most exciting atmosphere.
 

disco said:
I'm not positive, but I think there were some other things. NDSU games were a massive tailgating party for years, and I think they've really cracked down on it in the last decade or so. I know there have been a lot of complaints about the dome, and ticket prices for the overall experience.

A lot of the fan base comes from outside FM and they may be tired of traveling hours for uncompetitive football, and in the late season (remember FCS plays well into December - FBS does not) weather can be a factor.

And honestly, it's like anything else. People can watch on their 85 inch TV, flip between games, eat their own food and drink their own beer. Not to mention, Fargo has grown a lot, and with that comes other entertainment options that are competing for a finite amount of disposable entertainment money. It's a reason I've always said that the Gophers aren't going to draw like an Alabama. It's not because "its a pro town" it's because there are a lot of entertainment options.

You mention Montana/MSU. I watched some of those games this year, and it looks like an AWESOME experience. I've been to NDSU games. It's not the most exciting atmosphere.
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Playing in a crappy dome doesn't help. College football should be played outside no matter what the weather.
 




disco said:
It was, but I think there were some improvements to the dome as well.

My personal opinion on the place, FWIW, is that it's dark and depressing.
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Pictures of it remind me of some of the older indoor rinks I played in many moons ago. Drab, dark, a bit musty, and full of echoes.
 

GoldRush said:
Toured NDSU with one of my kids and that was kind of my take on the entire campus.
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It's a typical state college IMO. Indistinguishable from hundreds of others across the country where the ambience is more tire plant than architecture. It doesn't matter, though. The undergrad experience is about relationships.
 

GoldRush said:
Toured NDSU with one of my kids and that was kind of my take on the entire campus.
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I toured NDSU and SDSU with my daughter a few years ago. Was not impressed in the least with NDSU's campus. It was very crammed together and not a lot of open space. The buildings were right on top of one another. I thought the SDSU campus was laid out much better. Lots of room to breathe open quads. To me Brookings was a much better campus.
 


disco said:
I'm not positive, but I think there were some other things. NDSU games were a massive tailgating party for years, and I think they've really cracked down on it in the last decade or so. I know there have been a lot of complaints about the dome, and ticket prices for the overall experience.

A lot of the fan base comes from outside FM and they may be tired of traveling hours for uncompetitive football, and in the late season (remember FCS plays well into December - FBS does not) weather can be a factor.

And honestly, it's like anything else. People can watch on their 85 inch TV, flip between games, eat their own food and drink their own beer. Not to mention, Fargo has grown a lot, and with that comes other entertainment options that are competing for a finite amount of disposable entertainment money. It's a reason I've always said that the Gophers aren't going to draw like an Alabama. It's not because "its a pro town" it's because there are a lot of entertainment options.

You mention Montana/MSU. I watched some of those games this year, and it looks like an AWESOME experience. I've been to NDSU games. It's not the most exciting atmosphere.
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I'd consider a trip for the Brawl of the Wild.
West Fargo Gopher Fan said:
if I remember right it was to add a "convention center" *yawn*
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There were arena improvements as well. Premium seating was a big part of it. I think the Fargo Dome has Metrodome style suites that are probably a downgrade from a typical seat. I think a lot of it was infrastructural work like more women's rooms and lobby space. There's frankly not a lot you can do with the place. It's a big, ugly, utilitarian concrete box. I went to a boat show there once. They can probably fit a lot of seniors in there as a dining site, too
DarrenTheGreek said:
I toured NDSU and SDSU with my daughter a few years ago. Was not impressed in the least with NDSU's campus. It was very crammed together and not a lot of open space. The buildings were right on top of one another. I thought the SDSU campus was laid out much better. Lots of room to breathe open quads. To me Brookings was a much better campus.
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It's in a bit if a dingy neighborhood hemmed in by the interstate, airport, and railroad tracks. The campus in Brookings is nicer IMO but I'm biased.
 

Recency bias makes it hard for me to believe NDSU played in the Fargo Dome for over a decade as a D2 team.
 

Crosby said:
Wonder if this means that the Gophs will be willing to schedule a game against them more often. I really don't care that much but will be interesting to see if it makes a difference.
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I doubt it. With 9 conference games and then another P4 nonconference game, they're scheduling pretty light for the other two games. Lower half G5 and FCS opponents.
 

North Dakota has only 800,000 people to split between two FCS teams. I highly doubt NDSU will be in play for the Big 12 any time soon. There just aren't enough people around. It seems to me they are capitalizing on their relatively recent success to move up the food chain one notch from top FCS to bottom FBS. There was no guarantee they'd be able to continue their success finding gems that FBS programs were missing on. Eventually, there's a good chance the local FBS teams figure out your angle and adopt it.

They may have permanently moved themselves above UND similar to what Washington did by ditching Washington State and joining the B1G. UND is probably the most scared by this move. NDSU now has more upside potential even if it carries greater risk. A lot of the people in power aren't using their own money anyway so how big is the risk really?
 

SeaBee_Gopher said:
North Dakota has only 800,000 people to split between two FCS teams. I highly doubt NDSU will be in play for the Big 12 any time soon. There just aren't enough people around. It seems to me they are capitalizing on their relatively recent success to move up the food chain one notch from top FCS to bottom FBS. There was no guarantee they'd be able to continue their success finding gems that FBS programs were missing on. Eventually, there's a good chance the local FBS teams figure out your angle and adopt it.

They may have permanently moved themselves above UND similar to what Washington did by ditching Washington State and joining the B1G. UND is probably the most scared by this move. NDSU now has more upside potential even if it carries greater risk. A lot of the people in power aren't using their own money anyway so how big is the risk really?
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Forum reporter Rob Port for one is indignant over the ability of school bureaucrats to obligate the school to spend a lot more money. The contract with MWC not only requires a huge buy in but also that NDSU increase it's football budget to "reasonably competitive" to typical MWC football budget. If NDSU finishes under .500 ( which seemd unlikely) it has to increase it's budget to the conference average. In short, it has to double it's current average without new football revenue streams, i.e. this is either all fundraising, on the backs of students and taxpayers, from revenue offsets elsewhere (goodbye wrestling and baseball) or a combination. There is downside risk for sure. I really don't buy the "bored of winning" bit. The Bison dominance ended when the decade turned over. FCS is more competitive. There'll be maybe initial excitement but watching games against UTEP or midnight games against Hawaii, or even 9 pm games against San Jose isn't going to be exciting very long.
 

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