NCAA tracker shows FCS teams' all-time wins over FBS opponents

Every FCS-over-FBS upset is a stress test of college football’s hierarchy. The NCAA’s all-time tracker turns those shockers into a living record of relevance, because FCS programs keep stepping into games against deeper, richer FBS rosters and occasionally walking out with wins that reshape perception.

The ledger matters now because the resource gap keeps widening. FCS schools operate with fewer scholarships and smaller budgets, so when they beat an FBS opponent it is more than a Saturday headline. It is proof that the subdivision still produces teams capable of punching through the sport’s power structure, and NCAA.com’s February 9, 2026 tracker shows that the habit is still alive, with six FCS-over-FBS upsets in 2024.

How the tracker tells the story

The tracker is useful because it does more than count isolated wins. NCAA.com groups the results by all-time victories, upsets, and wins against ranked opponents, which gives readers a clean way to measure both volume and difficulty. The history goes back to the 1978 Division I split into I-A and I-AA, now FBS and FCS, and that long runway is why the record still matters every year.

The sample size is huge. Fear The FCS says there have been 3,708 games between FCS and FBS teams since the split, which puts the upset ledger in context: these are not rare one-off exhibitions, but a repeated measuring stick. NCAA.com’s 2021 coverage said there had been 30 FCS-over-FBS upsets in the previous five years, a reminder that the old hierarchy has never completely held.

The benchmark wins that still anchor the conversation

Some games have become shorthand for what FCS football can do. James Madison’s 2010 win over Virginia Tech remains one of the standard-bearers, the kind of result that showed an FCS program could walk into a major setting and win on merit. Georgia Southern’s 2013 upset of Florida belongs in the same conversation, especially because it kept the FCS line of upsets in the national spotlight.

North Dakota State has added its own signature moment to the record book. NCAA.com identified the Bison’s 2016 win over No. 13 Iowa as their fifth FCS/I-AA upset over a ranked opponent, which is the sort of detail that separates a good program from a historic one. Once the opponent carries a ranking, the result stops being just an upset and becomes a résumé event with playoff and branding value attached.

Which programs keep the tradition alive

Fear The FCS’s team-records page names North Dakota State and Northwestern State among the most successful FCS programs against FBS opponents, showing that the tradition is carried by more than one dynasty. North Dakota State’s run is the one that most fans know because it has lived near the top of the subdivision for years, but Northwestern State’s place on that list shows how deep the upset history runs beyond the heavyweights.

The most recognizable pipelines for these wins have also changed over time. Appalachian State had seven FCS-over-FBS wins before it moved to FBS in 2014, and Boise State had seven before its own move up. Those totals matter because they show how FCS success can become a stepping stone: sustained dominance eventually earns a school a different place in the college football pecking order.

Today, the programs most associated with the modern version of the ledger still tend to come from the Missouri Valley and Big Sky footprints. North Dakota State and South Dakota State keep the Missouri Valley in the conversation, while Montana and Montana State keep the Big Sky in it, and those schools are often the ones turning early-season crossover games into ranking jolts. The historic names changed, but the pattern did not.

Why one upset changes more than one ranking line

These games matter inside the subdivision because they create immediate consequences. NCAA.com’s September 6, 2021 coverage of South Dakota State and Montana showed how early-season FBS upsets can lift teams in the Stats Perform FCS Top 25 and push them into the national conversation, and that same weekend featured six FCS teams beating FBS opponents, the most in a week since 2013. When those results arrive in September, they can alter how poll voters, playoff watchers and recruits see the rest of the season.

The effect extends beyond rankings. A win over an FBS school can validate a coaching staff’s system, energize a fan base and give a team a signature game that survives in previews and highlight packages long after the season ends. In the guarantee-game economy, the bigger school is usually buying a home game and a safer result, which is why the upset lands with so much force when the underdog breaks through.

That is also why recent results still get folded into the larger record. Press Break’s August 27, 2024 roundup placed Montana State’s 35-31 win over New Mexico inside the broader history of FCS-over-FBS shocks, the kind of framing that makes a single road win feel like part of an ongoing line rather than an isolated burst. The ledger keeps growing, but its meaning has not changed: every new upset is another argument that FCS football still belongs on the national stage.

The tracker endures because it captures the subdivision’s clearest proof of relevance. As long as FCS programs keep winning enough of these cross-division games to force the conversation, the gap in budgets and scholarships will matter, but it will not be the whole story.