Although the thought of moving up to the highest level of college football had long percolated at Missouri State, it didn’t start to formalize until the run-up to a game at Arkansas State in 2015.

The Sun Belt Conference had just invited Coastal Carolina from the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS), and member Arkansas State liked the idea of adding a peer only 200 miles away in Missouri’s third-largest city (Springfield) to the conference too. There was enough mutual interest between Missouri State and the conference for preliminary talks. The matchup wasn’t supposed to be a trial run for the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), exactly, but it quickly became a four-quarter feasibility study into the Bears’ immediate potential in the highest subdivision.

They lost 70-7.

“We just got the hell beat out of us,” said Clif Smart, then Missouri State’s president. “It was a humiliating, awful game. We went home from that going, ‘We’re not anywhere close to being ready.’”

They are now. Or at least they’d better be.

Missouri State became a Conference USA member this summer, joining Delaware as the newest programs in the 136-team FBS. The Bears’ FBS debut is at USC on Aug. 30.

2025 Conference USA football members

TeamLocation

Newark, Del.

Miami, Fla.

Jacksonville, Ala.

Kennesaw, Ga.

Lynchburg, Va.

Ruston, La.

Murfreesboro, Tenn.

Springfield, Mo.

Las Cruces, N.M.

Huntsville, Texas

El Paso, Texas

Bowling Green, Ky.

It’s a big jump for any team, going from recent home openers like Lindenwood and Lincoln University of Missouri to No. 16 SMU. But it seems especially ambitious for a losing program (.483 all-time winning percentage) with only one (shared) conference title and six winning seasons this century. To make it happen, the Bears needed more than the usual administrative commitment and hush-hush politicking to grab what they thought could be one of the last FBS spots available.

They needed one of college sports’ biggest lightning rods to show proof-of-concept that a basketball school in a basketball region can, finally, win in football.

They needed Bobby Petrino.

The Bears’ glory days came in a 15-year stretch, mostly away from the gridiron and under a different name, Southwest Missouri State.

From 1987-99, only four current mid-majors made the NCAA Tournament in men’s basketball more than the Bears (six appearances): New Mexico, Murray State, Princeton and UMass. They hung with Kansas and UNLV, knocked off Clemson and upset Wisconsin and Tennessee to make the Sweet 16 as a No. 12 seed in 1999.

“Everybody was going to basketball games,” said Ned Reynolds, a Springfield sports broadcaster for the last 58 years. “Everybody.”

Though the program has fallen to 221-226 over the past 14 seasons, basketball still resonates. The Bears opened a new arena in 2008, and a budget working group ranked hoops ahead of football in a 2017 document obtained by the Springfield News-Leader.

The women’s program is even better. The Lady Bears have made 17 of the past 33 NCAA Tournaments, led the nation in attendance in 1993 and made the Final Four in 1992 and 2001. Jackie Stiles was Caitlin Clark before Caitlin Clark, becoming the first woman to score 1,000 points in a season and graduating as the NCAA’s all-time leading scorer (3,393 points, which still ranks fifth).

Football flashed with back-to-back FCS playoff appearances in 1989-90 … then lost 191 of its next 320 games. The 70-7 debacle at Arkansas State was the program’s worst loss in 94 years and showed the FCS/FBS gap in facilities, talent, commitment and everything else. As losing seasons mounted, fans weren’t the only ones questioning the program’s existence. School officials considered cutting it.

“Forget about FBS,” said Kyle Moats, who was Missouri State’s athletic director from 2009-24 before going to Eastern Kentucky. “We had a serious thought as to, are we going to continue to keep going this route.”

The doubts led to the next turning point in late 2019. As the Bears stumbled through a 1-10 season, Moats got a call from Petrino, who was a year removed from being fired at Louisville. Petrino had high-level success with the Cardinals (77-35 over two stints) and at Arkansas (21-5 over his final two seasons) but also had high-profile exits at both stops. He wanted back in the game, and the Bears wanted to give him a chance to answer the program’s existential question.

“Could you win at football at Missouri State?” Smart asked.

Turns out, you can. Petrino brought the Bears to the FCS playoffs for the first time in three decades with back-to-back appearances and a share of the Missouri Valley Football Conference title before returning to the FBS as an offensive coordinator.

“All of a sudden, we believed — we actually believed — we could move to FBS and compete,” Smart said.

Which led to the next question. Should the Bears move to FBS if given the chance?

That answer was easier. Missouri State was one of the largest schools still in the FCS. The projected cost — about $10 million up front plus another $5 million annually — was significant but could be offset at least in part by larger conference distributions and bigger paychecks from Power 4 opponents. Administrators viewed a more prominent football program as a valuable marketing tool to help meet their goal of growing enrollment from 25,000 to 30,000 by 2030; the school could gain exposure through nationally televised weeknight contests and the EA Sports video game while adding an enhanced element to campus life.

Going all-in on basketball was a non-starter. Because power conferences now monopolize at-large NCAA Tournament spots, the Bears would be trading one one-bid league (the Missouri Valley) for another.

“The way college athletics is and the way it’s been going for the last decade, football is certainly the one that is driving pretty much everything,” said Patrick Ransdell, who succeeded Moats as athletic director last summer.

The final pieces came together in the spring of 2024. The conference realignment chain reaction that started with the SEC adding Texas and Oklahoma was whittling Conference USA down to five members. The league needed to backfill, and Missouri State was a geographic and institutional fit. Because school administrators envisioned the industry’s biggest brands wanting fewer, not more, FBS teams in the future, they feared the window to jump was closing.

“If we’re gonna do this,” Smart said, “we gotta do this now.”

Last May, the Bears earned and accepted an invitation as Conference USA’s 12th member. Ready or not, they had arrived.

It’s easy to see why prognosticators peg the Bears to finish in the bottom half of the league in Year 1. Since 2014, every FCS regular that moved up to FBS won at least 59 percent of its games in the five full seasons before the jump. Even with Petrino’s bump, Missouri State is at .456 (excluding the 2020-21 COVID campaign).

5-year FCS records before FBS moves

*Since 2014, excluding 2020-21 season and Charlotte, which played only two FCS seasons before moving up.

But the numbers don’t tell the full story.

The Bears played in what Ransdell called the SEC of the FCS. North Dakota State and South Dakota State have won the past four national titles, South Dakota was a top-four seed last year and Illinois State and Youngstown State have both reached the FCS finals since 2014. The Bears’ only defeats last season were to three playoff teams (Montana, South Dakota State and North Dakota State) and an eight-point road loss to an FBS school (Ball State).

Third-year coach Ryan Beard — Petrino’s son-in-law — reeled off eight consecutive wins last season and returns record-breaking quarterback Jacob Clark, a former top-500 national recruit at Minnesota.

“We feel like we can step in and compete,” Ransdell said.

Even if they can, the Bears still face other difficulties off the field. With no dedicated football facility yet, the team meets in the auditorium of a nearby academic hall. The 17,500-seat Robert W. Plaster Stadium needs more than the new turf, new lights and deep pressure-washing it recently received in Phase 0 of a three-phase update. Budgets have not yet been finalized, but Ransdell estimated future costs at $50 million.

Those upgrades will be easier if Missouri State can accomplish a final challenge: making the community care.

Since 1994, the Bears have cracked the top 20 in FCS home attendance only five times. Their average crowds (9,663 last year) are typically closer to McNeese and North Carolina Central than Delaware or the Dakota schools.

“My theory is, it wasn’t that people didn’t want football,” said Smart, the university’s president emeritus after retiring last year. “They didn’t like losing football. They didn’t like bad football.”

There are early indications Smart’s theory is correct. Season ticket revenue is up $200,000. Students voted to approve a $140 increase in their athletic fees to help fund the move. The fact that the Bears were able to keep Clark — one of FCS’ top passers after setting school records in passing yards (3,604) and touchdowns (26) last year — in the transfer portal era wasn’t lost on school president Richard “Biff” Williams.

“There’s a culture that did that, but of course I’m sure there’s some donors and some NIL and some things that helped him stay,” Williams said. “I think that tells you kind of where our community and coaches and others are.”

Where they are now is a long way from where they were a decade ago against Arkansas State. What started with a devastating 70-7 defeat led to a proof-of-concept flash from Petrino and, finally, a trip to the Coliseum to face USC and a visit from a reigning College Football Playoff team, SMU, as a fellow member of the sport’s top division.

Will the school, the team and the community finally be ready?

“The sense that I get is, this is the Show-Me State,” said Reynolds, the longtime local broadcaster. “Show us.”

(Photo: Nathan Papes / Springfield News-Leader / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)