The Bison Dynasty

North Dakota State University sits about a mile northeast of downtown Fargo, on a campus established in eighteen ninety as the state's land-grant institution. It opened as North Dakota Agricultural College, which made sense: the state was wheat country, and the practical sciences of farming were what the territory needed from its public university. The name changed to North Dakota State University in nineteen sixty, after four decades of effort by faculty and students who felt the old name undersold the institution.

What the university became in the twenty-first century surprised nearly everyone outside of Fargo. The football program, known as the Bison, won five consecutive Football Championship Subdivision national titles between twenty-eleven and twenty-fifteen. Five straight. It was the longest championship streak in college football history at any level. During that span, the Bison went seventy-one and five. Their playoff winning streak reached twenty-two consecutive games. Three of the ten national championship seasons ended with a perfect record.

College football dynasties are not unusual, Alabama, Ohio State, Notre Dame have all had their eras. But this was a Division One subdivision program in Fargo, North Dakota, in a conference that drew no national attention, producing a body of work that made sports historians search for comparisons and come up empty. By twenty twenty-five, NDSU had won ten FCS national titles total, four more than any other program in history.

The Bison mascot had been chosen in nineteen twenty-two by a vote of the Lettermen's Club, replacing the earlier nickname of Aggies. A bison was considered fierce and strong, a fitting symbol for a plains university. As it turned out, fierce and strong was accurate.