We’re zooming into 2025, but what a fall season it was. First-time champions, rubber matches and a dynasty was officially born. Now that we are a third of the way through our 2024-25 national championships, let’s put the fall in perspective with a look back at the champions.
Ferris State’s unthinkable run
The 2024 DII football season was one with many plot twists. There were four straight different No. 1 teams. The two-time defending national runners-up didn’t even make the tournament despite finishing 8-3, and programs like Miles, Virginia Union and Ashland won their first DII football championship games.
Yet, when the dust cleared, four DII football powerhouses were left standing in the national semifinals and we wound up with the rubber match between Ferris State and Valdosta State. As it was in 2021, the 2024 matchup was all Ferris State, giving the Bulldogs their third national championship since that 2021 victory.
It isn’t simply that the Bulldogs keep winning, it is how they are doing it that has made them the current DII football dynasty. The three championship game wins came at an average score differential of 34.3 points. When the Bulldogs won in 2021, not one team came within 20 points of them. In 2022, Ferris State had some close games, but once the semifinals began, it wasn’t even a contest. This year, not one game was within one score as it won its four DII football championship games by an average of 35 points.
This is a program that has made 70 percent of the national quarterfinals over the past decade. Head coach Tony Annese has done it with different quarterbacks every time and has had a standout defensive lineman turn into a superstar annually with one of the best offensive lines in the game. It was Grand Valley State in the aughts, then Northwest Missouri State in the 2010s. No matter what happens for the rest of the 2020s, the decade belongs to Ferris State.
Lynn-sanity: The Fighting Knights’s magical Saturday
It was quite the fall for Lynn. The Fighting Knights won two national championships in one day — not a bad way to head into the holiday break at all.
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