On Monday night history will be made with the crowning of the first College Football Playoff national champion. While either Ohio State or Oregon will go down as a trivia answer in that respect, this weekend could see FCS juggernaut North Dakota State make some history of its own. The Bison take on Illinois State in the FCS National Championship Game and could win its fourth consecutive national championship. If they do, it would mark the second time in college football history when one school wins four straight national championships in outright fashion in four consecutive seasons.

Princeton and Yale accomplished the feat with four straight consensus national championships in the game’s earliest of days, when the rules were primitive and facemasks were far from being a thought. The Princeton Tigers won national titles in 1869, 1870, 1872 and 1873. What happened in 1871? It turns out there was a season with no football played, on record at least. It should be noted Princeton’s dominant era saw minimal competition from Rutgers and Columbia, so put those national titles down with a huge asterisk next to them.

Yale’s early dynasty was only slightly more legitimate in the early days of the sport. The Bulldogs split the 1880 season for top honors with Princeton, in a season that saw a total of eight schools playing the sport, with expansion reaching to Kentucky and scoring included a way to score half a point. Throw another asterisk next to this streak by Yale if you wish.

By the turn of the 20th century, colleges football was taking off. The 1901 season saw 45 schools with teams, and the Michigan Wolverines started to become one of the early blueblood programs on its way to dominance. The Wolverines claimed at least a share of the mythical national championship each season from 1901 through 1904, sharing the top honors on an annual basis with Ivy League powers like Yale, Princeton and Penn and later with Minnesota.

Fast forward to the more modern era of the game, and you are hard-pressed to find any school even sniffing four straight titles. Not even in Division 3, which has been dominated over the past 15 years by Mount Union and Wisconsin-Whitewater, have we seen a school win four straight titles since Augustana (IL) did so from 1983 through the 1986 seasons. As good as Mount Union and UW-Whitewater have been at the D3 level, neither school has been able to pull a four-peat, although each have gone three years in a row with a title since 2000. UW-Whitewater has won five of the last six national titles at the D3 level, but still no four-peat.

In Division 2, the closest we have seen is Grand Valley State, first with current Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly and later with current Miami-Ohio head coach Chuck Martin, win four out of five championships from 2002 through 2006.

It is incredibly hard to win one national championship, never mind two in a row. Or three in a row. Forget about winning four in a row, unless you are North Dakota State. The Bison, I believe, will make history on Saturday afternoon in Frisco, Texas by winning its fourth straight national championship against a talented and threatening Illinois State program.

Note: Here is a good catch by someone on Reddit who read this. From u/Creeping_Death;

“They didn’t mention it in the article, but NDSU was also 1 point shy of having 4 straight D2 national titles in the 80’s. They won it in 83, 85, and 86. They lost in the 84 championship game to Troy State by a score of 18-17.”

Now THAT would have been something else.