Around this time each year, every college football outlet begins some sort of season preview series, and Until Saturday is no exception. There will be no consistent outline to these, and if I were to start handing out superlative categories, I’d forget to do them at some point. I do not have any Phil Steele-style acronyms yet, but maybe I’ll invent some.
We’re just gonna wing it.
Let’s start it off by going a little broader than just FBS, even though there isn’t exactly space to dig into each Division III conference’s 2025 schedule. (Then again, this parenthetical is now the newsletter’s third mention this year of Middlebury College.)
Just to have it all in one place, here are the defending champs in these NCAA levels — and as you can see, repeats would not be shocking:
- DI FCS: North Dakota State, 10th since 2011
- DII: Ferris State (Mich.), third since 2021
- DIII: North Central (Ill.), third since 2019
Beyond the who’s-gonna-win basics, though: Considering the amount of national attention usually paid to college sports outside of Division I’s upper levels, it feels urgent to check in on the big-picture status of small schools in The NIL And Portal Era.
So I asked a couple-ish questions to Matt Brown (no relation to The Athletic’s Matt Brown, though they have hung out at Big Ten media days, per sources), the proprietor of Extra Points, an excellent newsletter digging into loads of off-field stories about college sports from the NAIA on up. (This includes Matt’s extensive coverage of the video game.)
Over the past five years or so, how has life generally changed for athletic directors in levels outside of FBS?
Matt: “Being a small-school AD has always been a tough gig, because smaller staff sizes require you to be more involved in everything from fundraising to hiring and coach development. In the NIL era, the job had become even harder — because now you have to pretend you have the donor support to justify a meaningful collective, and your players can leave faster. That isn’t to say it’s all bad, but a lot of folks aren’t sleeping as well as they used to.”
What about when it comes to football in particular?
“The thing that’s tougher about football is that the roster is so much larger. If a third of your basketball roster transfers, that really sucks, but that’s four people. In football, that’s like 28 dudes, people who then have to be replaced during a very truncated recruiting cycle. That puts even more pressure on your coaches and donors, and makes sustaining success much harder. Winning the league is awesome, but if it means seven of your starters bounce for the ACC, it takes a toll on everybody.”
If you had to take either The Dakotas or Everybody Else to win the FCS title this year: Who ya got?
“Few people have ever gone broke betting on the Dakotas to win a national title.”
Hey, follow Matt on Bluesky here.
Poll time! Same question for you: Dakotas or non-Dakotas for this season’s FCS title?
As for me and my house, once again we will ride with the pride of the beautiful Big Sky Conference, the Montana State Bobcats, who fell just short of the title in Frisco, Texas last year.
They’re No. 2 behind NDSU in the early FCS top 25s by Hero Sports and Flo Football, with 2023 champ South Dakota State and the rapidly emerging South Dakota right behind.
(North Dakota unleaded is currently the local straggler.)
Up next week: Conference USA and the MAC.
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