DAWN OF DI ERA Valpo

By Jeff Kolpack The Forum

Fargo

North Dakota State defeated Valparaiso (Ind.) 52-0 in the first Division I football game played at Gate City Bank Field at the Fargodome. It was in 2004 and the marketing blitz the NDSU administration put into the game bordered on all-out effort.

It worked. The game was a sellout, rare in those days. After the game, then-athletic director Gene Taylor told assistant athletic director Troy Goergen that university president Joe Chapman wanted to see him in his office.

Goergen wondered if he was in trouble. Taylor and Chapman played it up like he was.

“I think he was a little nervous, put it that way,” Taylor said this week.

Once in Chapman’s office, the administrators presented Goergen with a “pet rock” after Forum newspaper columnist Mike McFeely wrote the marketing campaign was “one of the most masterful marketing jobs since the Pet Rock.”

They all had a good laugh.

Goergen still has the rock with Valparaiso coming to the dome for the second time Saturday afternoon for a 2:30 kickoff.

Seventeen years later, the Valpo program has pretty much remained what it was while NDSU went on to win eight FCS national titles in a nine-year span.

It had to start somewhere.

When it comes to the NDSU game-day atmosphere, perhaps the beginning date was Aug. 28, 2004, with the Valparaiso game. It was the culmination of a marketing effort that started earlier that year and never fell off.

For starters, Bison fans needed an education on the different levels of Division I football from the FBS Big Ten Conference to the non-scholarship FCS Pioneer League, of which Valparaiso is a member.

NDSU began play in the five-team Great West Football Conference that season, but nobody really knew much about the rest of the FCS, which was Division I-AA back then.

For many fans, their footprint of football for decades consisted of