North Dakota State Fans Face 'No. 1 Question' on FBS Move – Heavy Sports

North Dakota State‘s move to the FBS has turned heads around college football after 10 FCS championships, but the biggest change for the Bison may come at the end of each season at the new level.

“That’s the No. 1 question,” former Bison play-by-play radio announcer Jeff Culhane recently told The Athletic.

The Bison fan base is accustomed to winning national championships with 10 in the FCS over a 15-year span and eight in Division II titles over three decades. As The Athletic’s Austin Meek and Matt Baker explored, those days are likely over for the Bison, and Meek and Baker talked with Bison fans about the drastic change ahead. No Group of Six conference team has ever won a College Football Playoff game.

“When you win a bowl game, you’re not, like, the top dog,” 2014 NDSU graduate Bri Gefroh told The Athletic. “You just beat another team that’s pretty good. I don’t think it’s the same atmosphere, the same level of anxiety as you enter into that (championship) game. You either raise that trophy or you don’t.”

Geforh attended 10 of the Bison’s 11 FCS championship games in Frisco, Texas. She’s among the thousands of Bison fans who made the annual trip to Texas, and Frisco became known as “Fargo South” because of the large contingent that filled the local establishments.

“Bowl games can be kind of fun, too,” Gefroh acknowledged. “The different locations might be kind of fun for fans instead of going to Frisco year after year after year.”

Bison Fans Were Bored

Perhaps NDSU’s final game as an FCS team said everything.

The Fargodome had low attendance in December 2025 when the Illinois State Redbirds shocked the Bison at the last minute in the FCS playoff quarterfinals. Normally, the Fargodome was packed with decibel levels over 100 as fans cheered on the Bison in the playoffs, amid a  38-2 mark at home.

That dwindled as the Bison collected titles eight, nine, and 10 with an unbeaten season along the way or sleepy Saturday afternoons where NDSU led big in the second half most games. NDSU had three unbeaten FCS seasons between 2013 and 2019, and the last two seasons only had two losses — one with a loss to Colorado in 2024 and the playoff shocker in 2025.

Local media in Fargo saw the dynamic clearly. Bison 1660 AM program director Andy Rieckhoff told The Athletic how he has seen the difference since the recent FBS move.

“It’s already reignited the fan base a little bit,” Rieckhoff said. “It’s a chance to conquer another level.”

Ex-NDSU, Cincinnati Bengals Tackle: ‘I Was Pretty Immune’

Former NDSU All-American and Cincinnati Bengals offensive tackle Landon Lechler, who played in Fargo from 2013 to 2016, admitted to The Athletic that he didn’t believe the FBS news at first after years of rumors.

“I was pretty immune to different reports,” Lechler said. “At first it was like, ‘Here we go again with another rumor.’ Once it gained traction and we saw it was confirmed, it was pretty cool.”

Lechler played in many of the Bison’s FCS-FBS games, which included upsets of Iowa State and then-No. 13 Iowa. He now runs a grain co-op in Beach, N.D., his hometown.

Matthew Davis covers the NFL, WNBA and college sports for Heavy.com. As a contributing writer to the StarTribune, he has also covered Minnesota prep sports since 2016. More about Matthew Davis