Crusaders

Mary Hardin–Baylor has turned the American Southwest Conference into a formality, and the program keeps arriving at the national playoffs expecting to still be there in January.

Football only joined the university's athletics programme in 1998, under Pete Fredenburg, decades after the school itself was founded in Belton, Texas. A first national championship arrived in 2016, then had to be struck from the record in 2020 after ineligible players were found to have taken part. The Crusaders answered by winning it again in 2018, beating Mount Union, and once more in 2021 against North Central — the kind of response that settles an argument better than any statement could.

Crusader Stadium, which opened in 2013 and holds just over 9,000, saw its record crowd on the very day it opened, when the Crusaders put 59 points on Rowan in the second round of that year's playoffs. The rivalry that actually shapes the conference table each autumn is with Hardin-Simmons; when the two meet, the American Southwest Conference championship is usually still on the line. Jerrell Freeman and Blake Jackson went on from Belton to play in the NFL and CFL, proof that a Division III program in a Texas college town can still send players further.

What the Crusaders have not done is win a national title in three straight tries since 2021 — the conference keeps coming easily, the deeper rounds of the playoffs less so.