FARGO — A phone call was made to Matt Entz on Monday, Feb. 16. A question was asked of the former North Dakota State football head coach.
What do you think of the Bison’s move to the Mountain West Conference?
“I’m excited. It’s about damn time,” Entz said. “It probably should’ve happened a couple of years ago.”
Entz is now the head coach at Fresno State after spending 2019-2023 as the head coach at NDSU and a year as an assistant at USC. He was an assistant in Fargo for five years before taking over for Chris Klieman.
Entz, it can be told now, had plenty of skin in the game when it came to NDSU moving to FBS.
He was an early and strong advocate, even if he couldn’t be as public about it as he might’ve wanted.
Former NDSU president David Cook, athletic director Matt Larsen and a cast of many others deserve credit for this transformational move. No question.
So does Matt Entz. He was a key figure in getting the ball rolling to last week’s big news of NDSU’s football program making the leap from FCS to FBS.
Let me tell a story.
I received a phone call from Entz in November 2020 that began with a cryptic question: “Have time to talk?”
Sure, I said, what’s up?
Could’ve been any number of things. There was a bunch of stuff happening not only in the world, but in the Football Championship Subdivision sub-world.
The nation was still in the grip of the COVID pandemic. NDSU’s football season had been washed away other than one game against Central Arkansas at the Fargodome. Entz and others at the school had already griped the weakest programs in the Missouri Valley Football Conference were responsible for calling off the fall season because they didn’t want to compete. There was talk of the FCS playing a silly spring season in early 2021 and then turning around and playing another season in the fall.
Former North Dakota State head coach Matt Entz is now the head coach at Fresno State.
Contributed / Fresno State Athletics
Entz was already agitated with potentially the best team in Bison history, the heavy favorite to win another national championship in 2020, was already breaking up because the fall season was largely canceled. Quarterback Trey Lance was going to the NFL Draft, left tackle Dillon Radunz left NDSU to prepare for the draft, several other key players decided to not come back for the possible spring season.
It was a mess.
So what was on the coach’s mind?
“We have to go FBS,” Entz said.
And with that began a five-plus year journey that culminated with the recent announcement that NDSU will join the Mountain West Conference this fall.
I wrote a column based off our discussion
and kept writing them.
For close to an hour, Entz made his case. I listened and asked questions. Essentially, his argument came down to NDSU’s football program “running on a treadmill,” everybody from the athletic director to the last player on the roster working their tails off just to stay in place. That, combined with difficulty in scheduling non-conference games and the frustration of the fall 2020 season and a dozen other things pushed Entz over the edge in his FCS-to-FBS stance.
Entz was reminded of the conversation on Monday’s phone call. He remembered it.
“I think that phone call came after we had been told ‘no’ by everyone in the country about playing us. We were kind of the last holdout. We wanted to play that fall for a variety of reasons and we couldn’t find anybody other than Central Arkansas to play,” Entz said. “I remember vividly, we talked to a conference that had a school back out of the 2020 season. We called them and said, ‘We’ll take their place on the schedule. We just want to play the conference schedule. We’ll have their home games at our place and we’ll travel for their road games. We just want to play.’ We were told no, that the commissioner would get fired if he let us play in place of a conference member.”
It was an FBS conference, but Entz wouldn’t say which one. It’s not difficult to figure out.
“That was when I said we need to do something different,” Entz said.
The first column pushing for an FBS move didn’t come for a few weeks. There were phone calls, emails, discussions, research. I had to make up my own mind if NDSU going to FBS was the right thing for which to advocate.
Eventually, I came to that conclusion. The first column I wrote linking NDSU to FBS came Dec. 14, 2020, and was headlined,
“Time for Bison football to plan for moonshot to FBS.”
It called for the school to prepare for a move with the hope the Mountain West Conference would someday come calling.
The columns got stronger in subsequent years, outwardly calling for NDSU to make the move.
I reported last week NDSU had the first of two feasibility studies done in 2021,
looking at both the Mountain West and American Athletic conferences.
Entz eventually became more frontal in his support of an FBS move, giving an interview to The Athletic national sports website in which he said the American Athletic Conference would be a better fit than the Mountain West because of its presence in the Central time zone. The interview ran a couple of days before the Bison stomped Montana State in the national title game after the 2021 season.
Former North Dakota State head coach Matt Entz is the head coach at Fresno State.
Contributed / Fresno State Athletics
“There were a couple of years there where we lost some kids to the transfer portal because they saw there were really two levels above us, the Power Four and the Group of Five. Some of the guys went to the highest level, but there were some others who went places that you asked, ‘Is that really better than here?’ It didn’t really seem to matter whether they played better football, it was still a bigger brand,” Entz said. “So we tried to eliminate one of the levels the best we could by operating as close to an FBS program as we could, and I think we did that. But at some point we just needed to be at the next level. That way if a kid is going to leave, at least he’s leaving for something big.”
Entz doesn’t believe he started a flame or was going against the grain of his superiors, he just wanted the fan base and donors to think about what could be.
“Matt Larsen and I had many closed-door conversations about what this could look like in terms of budget, staffing, recruiting. I don’t think anybody was ever against it or I was out of school in wanting us to pursue it,” Entz said. “I think Matt and everybody knew it was going to be a big jump and it was probably always going to have to be football-only.”
Entz said there was briefly talk about NDSU joining Delaware in jumping to Conference USA, but that league wanted the Bison for all sports. It was untenable.
Would Entz have enjoyed being the coach to lead NDSU into FBS, since he was one of its strongest early advocates?
“Probably, but it didn’t work out,” he said. “Tim (Polasek, the head coach who replaced Entz) will do a tremendous job and I am excited for the university, to see where this goes. That’s one thing about NDSU is you never have to worry about them doing things the right way. They will find the right supporters, the right people to back the program and hopefully this will help not only the football program but the entire athletic department.”