North Dakota State

[rocket city poke]

Sources: North Dakota State joins Mountain West for football

FCS powerhouse North Dakota State has finalized an agreement to join the Mountain West Conference in football only starting in 2026, sources told ESPN.

www.espn.com

It’s happening, wow! $12 million is surprising too

They are doing football only. The entire athletic department budget at NDSU is $30 million. UW's budget is $55 million. Good argument UW could just stay in the MWC for football move to Summit with NDSU for all other sports and save $25 million. https://knightnewhousedata.org/fbs/mwc

 

[Douglaspoke]

Before Utah State moved into the MWC conference we thought of them as being a lower level, and now they have left the MWC to enter the PAC12......Wyoming is just a speed bump on the way to higher levels for so many schools... We used to be competitive with BYU at one time, and Utah and now look where they are and we are! We once played Arizona and Arizona St. in the same conference. Now CSU has moved along with Utah State.

and we would beat Arizona & A-state.

BIGHORN you are so right!

 

[OrediggerPoke]

They are doing football only. The entire athletic department budget at NDSU is $30 million. UW's budget is $55 million. Good argument UW could just stay in the MWC for football move to Summit with NDSU for all other sports and save $25 million. https://knightnewhousedata.org/fbs/mwc

How does Wyoming going to the Summit help us at all?!?!? NDSU is in the summit because it can bus their olympic teams to most conference opponents. The Summit would be MORE travel (to more obscure destinations) for Wyoming.

 

[307bball]

and we would beat Arizona & A-state.

BIGHORN you are so right!

I used to love reading articles in national publications that profiled Wyoming athletics.....smart media folks used to love keeping tabs on Wyoming. Those were the days.

 

[tnkl_42]

This is a cultural comedown for NDSU and not all that great for the MW. As a destination the Fargodome seats 18,700 and as for road games it's doubtful that many NDSU faithful will travel to places like El Paso, Laramie, San Jose or Colo Spgs. They lose some traditional rivals although I'm sure they'll keep their annual game vs the U. of North Dakota. The upside for the Bison is that now they can schedule a couple of higher-$$ OOC body bag games to help with revenue. And the TV revenue piece is better than what they had in FCS.

Meh all around.

NDSU likely will have SDSU join them next year imo. When the Dakotas began to jump from D2 to D1, NDSU went first and SDSU followed a year later, with UND and USD coming 4 years after that. Those two schools care far too much about the Dakota marker game and it sells far too many tickets for them to leave it dormant. I could maybe see NoDak jump in 5ish years but I think they'd be more worried about hockey, and USD won't. The DakotaDome is far too small and their fanbase struggles to fill it, only one game this year over 90% filled (hell they only had 39.4% capacity filled for the FCS first round game, and that probably had decent road fan turnout since Drake aint far down the road). Dakota Marker as a MW rivalry week game would be insanely fun and I'd be here for it