Fighting Hawks

North Dakota goes into another season in the Missouri Valley Football Conference, the league that handed the Fighting Hawks their most recent title in 2020, and the programme still measures itself against Big Sky company it kept as recently as 2016, when it took that conference crown as well.

The football side at Grand Forks dates back to 1894, well before the 2015 rebrand that swapped out the old Fighting Sioux name for Fighting Hawks, kept the Kelly green and white, and left the athletic identity otherwise untouched. One national championship sits on the record, from the Division II era in 2001, alongside a long run of North Central Conference titles that piled up through the 1920s to the 2000s.

None of that carries the weight of the last week of the regular season, when North Dakota State comes to town for the Nickel Trophy, a fixture the local press still files under the Battle of I-94 and one that draws more attention in Grand Forks than any conference standing. The Sitting Bull Trophy game against South Dakota, played as the Potato Bowl, runs a close second, a fixture with no love lost between the two Dakotas.