THE GREATEST TEAM TO NOT PLAY

By Jeff Kolpack The Forum Fargo

The last trip to Carbondale, Ill., started with a 39-game winning streak on the line, an FCS record that was challenging the overall Division I mark of 47 in a row by the University of Oklahoma. It ended with a team that played like it had lost 39 straight.

Southern Illinois blew out the Bison 38-14 in a jaw-dropping day at Saluki Stadium. That came during the pandemic-delayed 2020 season, of course, which was played in the spring of 2021. The season that was postponed may put NDSU in the following FCS category: The Greatest Team to Not Play.

Granted, the Bison played once in the fall against Central Arkansas. But what if that team had an 11-game regular season plus a presumed run through the FCS playoffs?

“I don’t think anyone would have gotten close,” said Jeff Culhane, NDSU’s play-by-play radio voice in 2020.

Start with quarterback Trey Lance and left tackle Dillon Radunz. Wide receiver Christian Watson would have been a junior. Right tackle Cordell Volson would have been a senior and offensive lineman Cody Mauch a junior.

“I mean, can you imagine, a Trey Lanceled offense?” Culhane said. “He was already the best player in the FCS as a redshirt freshman and it wasn’t even close. A Trey Lance-led offense with all of those weapons, skill players and the offensive line they had. It wouldn’t have mattered.”

Culhane believes that team had set the table to being “the greatest football team in NDSU history” in the Division I era. The comparable would have been 2013, 2018 and 2019 undefeated teams.

Lance was coming off a record-setting 2019 season that was one of the best individual efforts in FCS history.

It was all for the taking the following year after winning the Walter Payton Award that goes to the best offensive player in the FCS.

Then COVID-19 became a thing.

Carlton Lance, Trey’s father, remembers talking to his son in the early days of fall camp in 2020 before anything was postponed or canceled.

“I said, ‘How are things going?’” Carlton said this week. “He said, oh, dad, it’s really slowed down. It’s night and day. And I thought, oh my god, we already came off a great season, I was excited to see what he could do.”

First, the Oregon game was canceled. Then the FCS moved to the spring. For parents Carlton and Angie Lance, also canceled was most likely the last chance to watch their son play college football.

“Absolutely, Angie and I feel like we got cheated out of that,” Carlton said. “But we’ve moved on to different things.”

Trey moved on to become the third overall player taken in the 2021 NFL Draft by the San Francisco 49ers. Watson went in the second round and Volson the fourth round in the 2022

Draft. Mauch is expected to be a high pick next spring.

From left to right, the offensive line in 2020 would have been Radunz, Nash Jensen, Karson Schoening, Zach Kubas and Volson. Mauch likely would have been the sixth wheel in the line.

“That probably would have been the best North Dakota State football team to ever step on the field in my opinion,” Jensen said. “If we would have been able to put that team on the field just to see what we could have been, it would have been fun.

I’m kind of thinking what memories could have been made that year.”

Cornerback Josh Hayes was slated to return. Running back Adam Cofield would probably have stayed instead of transferring to Western Kentucky. Linebacker Jabril Cox had another year at NDSU, but the popular notion is he would have transferred to LSU anyway. Of the current Bison players, fullback Hunter Luepke was coming into his own as a sophomore in 2020. The tight ends would have been Noah Gindorff and Josh Babicz.

Babicz is on the Green Bay Packers practice squad and Gindorff is a pro prospect, assuming he overcomes a second surgery to his ankle that has him sidelined for the year. Hayes is a starting safety at Kansas State. Cofield was a pro prospect and Luepke is a highly regarded potential NFL Draft selection with some regarding him as the best available fullback.

And don’t discount veterans like linebacker Aaron Mercadel and defensive tackle Matt Biegler, who were going to play in the fall of 2020 but opted out when it was postponed. Culhane remembers talking to Radunz not long after the Bison beat James Madison in the 2019 title game and Radunz was already looking ahead to playing the University of Oregon in 2020 and the matchup with defensive end Kayvon Thibodeaux.

“He had already turned the page in getting prepared to play Thibodeaux, No. 5 for Oregon,” Culhane said.

“The first thing I think of offensively is that group would have been unbelievable to watch.” Instead, the pandemic postponed the 2020 season to the spring despite NDSU’s insistence of playing a fall FCS schedule. Not many other teams in its subdivision were on board. The schedule didn’t help the Bison either, opening the season on a Sunday against Youngstown State followed by flying to Carbondale on Friday for the Saturday game.

The Bison originally were not slated to play SIU in 2020 because of the 10-team rotating Valley schedule. But the schedule was re-tooled for the spring season after Indiana State opted out and the Salukis were added to NDSU’s league games.

“Everything in the spring, you take not only with a grain of salt but a shaker of salt that season,” Culhane said. “Everything was so different. It wasn’t normal. Sports are so much about routine and normalcy. You ask any player or coach and especially in college football it is so detail-oriented from a scheduling standpoint. It’s almost robotic and that was thrown out the window.”

The trip was problematic from the start, with the NDSU coaching staff more concerned about rooming assignments than anything else. Head coach Matt Entz had a chart of players separated into three groups: Those who had a positive test in 90 days or less, those who had a positive test from 90-150 days and a list of players who had neither. The idea was to room one player from each chart together, so as to try and prevent three negative players from getting the virus at one time. Moreover, it was NDSU’s first trip of the spring and just getting away from Fargo and campus was a big deal, much less playing a football game.

NDSU played like it wasn’t ready, getting its only scores on a “Hail Mary” to end the first half and another touchdown late in the fourth quarter. By the fourth quarter, the dreams of catching Oklahoma’s win streak were gone.

“They just came out with an intensity we couldn’t match,” Jensen said. “It really caught us off guard and we couldn’t bounce back from it. At some point in the second half, it was like, wow, this really just happened. I didn’t expect it and it was just a big moment of disbelief for all of us.”

It’s debatable if that would have happened anyway considering the Bison had Oregon on the schedule. At least one Division I assistant at an FBS school thought NDSU would have had a good shot.

“That’s the milliondollar question,” Entz said this week, with his team preparing for a return trip to SIU.

“I’m extremely biased, I think that team would have been really good, just the makeup of it and the leadership that was there. Coming off the 2019 season, I think there were people who were still hungry. But could’ve, would’ve, should’ve.”

As it was, it was The Greatest Team to Not Play.

Readers can reach Forum reporter Jeff Kolpack at jkolpack@ forumcomm.com. Twitter@ KolpackInForum