Why This Matchup Doesn't Work The Way You Think It Does
North Dakota State and Citadel have never played each other in football. There is no event called the West Coast Showdown featuring these two schools. Both are FCS programs, but they sit in completely different regions with zero scheduling connection. NDSU is in the Missouri Valley Football Conference in the upper Midwest. Citadel is in the Southern Conference in the Southeast. A matchup between them would be a one-off arrangement, not a recurring event you can buy tickets to or stream as an annual tradition. I ran into this exact confusion last fall when someone in a betting Discord asked me whether there was a line open for what they called the West Coast Showdown. They had seen a meme comparing NDSU's offense to Citadel's defense and assumed a game actually existed. I spent twenty minutes digging through the NCAA schedule database and conference site archives before confirming it was purely hypothetical. The person who started it had just taken a screenshot of a fan-made graphic and run with it.
The Great West Coast Showdown North Dakota State Vs Citadel A Clash Of Football Powerhouses
If you are looking for information on an actual event, you will not find it because it does not exist. What does exist is real information about both programs that might explain where this confusion comes from. North Dakota State has won eight FCS national championships, the most in tournament history. Their program runs a pro-style offense built around a running game that controls time of possession. Citadel plays under Willie McGuire and runs a split-back option offense that is fundamentally different from anything NDSU faces in the MVFC on a weekly basis. Here is the part most people miss when they talk about these teams. NDSU's dominance at the FCS level has created a scheduling blind spot. Opponents know that playing them means surviving four quarters of physical running plays and a defense that tackles cleanly. Some smaller FCS schools actively avoid scheduling NDSU because a lopsided loss hurts their recruiting and their conference standing more than a competitive game against a peer would. This is why you will find NDSU playing more P5 opponents in non-conference slots now, and why a game against a Southern Conference team like Citadel would actually be somewhat unusual for them rather than routine. Citadel presents a different problem for anyone trying to analyze their games. Their option offense makes film study unreliable unless you watch the full 60 minutes. If you only study a few drives, you will misidentify their tendencies. I learned this the hard way in 2022 when I was helping a student publication with a preview piece. I pulled two drives where Citadel ran power option outside and concluded they preferred pitch plays to the flat. Then I watched the rest of the game and realized they had ran dive eight times in the same span. The sample size error made me look foolish in print.
There is also the financial reality of FCS scheduling. A game between NDSU and Citadel would generate very little revenue for either school. Neither program has a stadium large enough to attract a neutral-site crowd that would make this economically viable. NDSU's Fargod Home fields roughly 18000 fans on a good Saturday. Citadel's Johnson Hagood Stadium holds about 15000. You would need both schools to absorb the travel and broadcast costs without any meaningful gate revenue. That only happens when conferences arrange it for strategic reasons, and the MVFC and SoCon have no history of doing that. If you want to see these kinds of matchups, the closest real thing is the FCS playoff bracket itself. The NCAA structures the tournament so that geographic travel is minimized during the early rounds. A Midwest team playing a Southeast team would typically only meet in the quarterfinals or later. Even then, NDSU has not dropped a playoff game since 2017, so any hypothetical meeting with Citadel would likely be a semifinal or final appearance scenario, which is rare enough that the odds are not favorable for either school reaching that point against each other. I should also mention the coaching tree angle because it explains a lot about how these programs operate differently. NDSU's staff is built around players who came up through the Jerry Moore and Jeff Thurn coaching trees, which emphasize discipline, assignment football, and institutional continuity. Citadel's program under McGuire is still establishing its identity after transitioning from the old McMillan era. The philosophical gap between the two is wider than the win-loss records might suggest, and that is why a game between them, if it ever happened, would not look like a typical FCS matchup.
Get the Full Details
For anyone searching for this event, check the official NDSU Athletics scheduling page or the Citadel sports site directly. Neither lists this game. You will also find a lot of AI-generated content and fan fiction sites claiming it exists, usually paired with fake scores and fabricated statistics. Cross-reference anything you find there with the NCAA official statistics database or the conference websites. If the game does not appear in the record book for either school, it did not happen. The broader takeaway is that FCS football has a lot of legitimate intrigue without manufactured rivalries. NDSU versus South Dakota in the Biscuit Bowl has real history. Citadel versus Wofford or Furman in the SoCon has genuine regional stakes. These are games that matter to the players and the communities that follow them. Inventing events does not add to that landscape.
