Ranking every North Dakota State FCS championship team

North Dakota State has won 10 FCS championships, the most of any football program in subdivision history. But which team would reign supreme if all the title-winning Bison met on the gridiron?

I ranked every North Dakota State championship-winning football team to find out. 

To try to make the rankings as objective as possible and to avoid biases of recency or the eventual NFL careers of Bison football alumni, I created a point system (shoutout to Andy Wittry for the inspiration) to evaluate North Dakota State teams that have won an FCS championship.

Here’s a breakdown of how the point system works:

• A maximum of 50 points for overall win percentage and strength of schedule
• A maximum of 25 points for success in the Missouri Valley Football Conference
  • An outright MVFC title is worth double the points of a shared conference title
• Playoff seed points are attributed as follows:
  • 1 seed (10 points), 2 seed (8 points), 3 seed (6 points), 4 seed (5 points), 5 seed (4 points), 6 seed (3 points), 7 seed (2 points), 8 seed (1 point)
    • To account for a change in FCS playoff seeding over time, unseeded teams and non-top-eight seeds are given one point for scoring purposes from the quarterfinal round and beyond.
• Bonus categories
  • ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 or SEC wins = 10 points
  • AAC, C-USA, MAC, Mountain West and Sun Belt wins = 8 points
  • Walter Payton, Buck Buchanan, Jerry Rice and Eddie Robinson Awards = 5 points each
  • Ranked FCS wins = 5 points

You can click or tap here to view the complete spreadsheet of the calculations and rankings.

Here are North Dakota State’s 10 championship teams, ranked.

1. 2019

Record: 16-0 (8-0 MVFC)
MVFC title: Outright
FCS Playoff seed: No. 1 seed

One can’t discuss the best teams in FCS history without 2019 North Dakota State, so it makes sense that this version of the Bison sit atop these rankings. The 2019 Bison led all of the nine…