Reusse: First-year coach Tim Polasek aims to lead North Dakota State’s return to top

South Dakota State has won the past two FCS national championships. The Jackrabbits also have won the past five meetings with North Dakota State over a period of four seasons.

Now that we are officially the Minnesota Star Tribune, it would be incumbent on us to lobby for our residents to root for the Bison to return to their status as the FCS bullies, based on the currently listed rosters for the two Missouri Valley powerhouses:

Minnesota high schoolers: NDSU 42, SDSU 9. Heck, the Bison have 12 more Gopher Staters than the Gophers.

North Dakota State has been a national power more often than not since Darrell Mudra inherited an 0-10 team in 1963, went 3-5, and then 21-1 with two bowl victories over the next two seasons. Mudra left for the Montreal Alouettes, and later coached both Arizona and Florida State.

Over the six decades since then, NDSU coaches generally have been very successful and moved on to higher-profile jobs, although not always with Mudra-style success.

Chris Klieman is getting there, though. He went 69-6 with four national championships in five NDSU seasons from 2014 to 2018.

Klieman has done very well at Kansas State, and he probably would have been a top target for the Gophers — if the “P.J. Fleck to UCLA” speculation had been more than a complete load of malarkey.

The replacement is Tim Polasek, an offensive assistant for 22 years — starting at NDSU, following Craig Bohl to Wyoming. He also worked four seasons for Kirk Ferentz at Iowa.

Polasek has a big personality and NDSU is hoping that enthusiasm works — obviously with the athletes, but also with a spoiled-by-success fan base that has been showing up in smaller numbers in the Fargodome.

“They even started selling beer at the dome, and that didn’t help,” said Mike McFeely, a columnist at the Forum of Fargo-Moorhead. “Attendance actually dropped a bit.”

Entz won NDSU’s eighth FCS national title with a 16-0 record in 2019, and the ninth with a 14-1 record in 2021 — and in between, he got robbed out of a probable third by that absence of a 2020 fall season.

Quarterback Trey Lance played one fall game and went into the NFL draft (No. 3 overall). The Bison lost other great players before the folly of a 2021 spring season (7-3).

Polasek, 44, was chosen as the new coach in December. The Bison went through the portal and came out with this mindset:

Whoever was showing up every day in NDSU’s new $55 million football facility, there would be no looking back — these were the players that would be getting the staff’s best shot.

“Kids want to be coached hard,” Polasek said. “You never hear from players, ‘You guys are being too hard on us.’ ”

South Dakota State? “They’ve been great, but in this league, it’s not one team,” Polasek said. “All the Dakota teams — South Dakota, North Dakota — are good. And Northern Iowa ... I remember that being the last team you wanted to play.’’

Plus, it’s hard to look ahead a couple of months to a Jackrabbits’ visit to Fargo on Oct. 19, when his first game as a Bison head coach is Thursday in Boulder against Deion Sanders’ Colorado Buffaloes.

Long time ago? “No, it seems like I just left,” Eli Mostaert said. “There was the COVID season, and I broke my leg in 2022, so that’s why I have a sixth year. I was set on using it.”

Colorado? “Excited to get out there.”

New coach? “He has a lot of emotion. We can use that fire.”

Lakeville North is well-recruited. Not so much for Minneapolis Southwest, where fifth-year running back TK Marshall played.

You go back far enough to be a Neon Deion fan, TK? “Not me; I come from a soccer family,” he said. “The reason I begged to play football was watching my hero, Adrian Peterson, run for the Vikings.