‘Polarizing’ NDSU Quarterback Set 4 Program Records In Just 1 Season—Now He’s Next Off The Pipeline

Cam Miller wasn’t some placeholder holding a seat. He was the real thing. Five seasons, 9,721 passing yards, 81 career passing touchdowns, and in his final year, he broke Carson Wentz’s single-season passing yards record at NDSU. Wentz had thrown for 3,111 yards in 2014, and Miller finished with 3,251. Miller was selected 215th overall by the Las Vegas Raiders in the 2025 NFL Draft and is now with the Miami Dolphins. So when people say Payton finally got his chance, they should say it right: Payton waited behind a future NFL quarterback, studied everything that man did, and the day Miller walked out of Fargo, Payton walked in and immediately did it better. That’s not luck or opportunity. That’s four years of watching, absorbing, refusing to check out.

One Season. Four Records. Nobody Saw It Coming

The scouts had a word for him going into 2025. Polarizing. Not because he was bad, because they hadn’t seen enough, and in NFL draft circles, unknown is a problem. He answered with 193.8 pass efficiency, a new NDSU single-season record. He averaged 268.9 yards of total offense per game, 9.71 yards per play, 12.1 yards per pass attempt — records, all four of them, in a program that has been producing professional quarterbacks for a decade. He threw 16 passing touchdowns against four interceptions and ran for 13 more scores. Against South Dakota State, the rival, the No. 2-ranked Jackrabbits, he carried the ball a career-high 17 times for 137 yards and four rushing touchdowns, part of a 380-yard offensive explosion, and completed 18-of-23 passes on top of that. One year. But he’d been preparing for four.

How This Place Does What It Does

The easiest explanation is the wrong one. People say NDSU wins because they’re FCS, play weaker competition, and inflate their numbers. That’s not nothing — but it also ignores the facts sitting right in front of you. Four quarterbacks drafted to the NFL since 2016, Carson Wentz, Easton Stick, Trey Lance, and Cam Miller, and Cole Payton is projected to make it five. Those are the same numbers Alabama and Ohio State are chasing. Those two programs recruit nationally ranked 17-year-olds with highlight packages produced by full-time videographers. NDSU recruits kids who didn’t get enough offers, plants them in a pro-style offense with complex reads and full-field processing demands, and spends years turning them into quarterbacks who think faster than anyone expects. The competition level at NDSU is lower. The preparation level is not.

The First One Who Proved It

Carson Wentz barely got recruited out of high school. Most schools passed. The ones that offered were FCS programs and schools nobody outside the Missouri Valley Conference would recognize. Central Michigan showed interest but never officially offered. Wentz signed with NDSU, and the rest went quiet. He backed up before becoming the starter, watching film and absorbing an offense designed for the next level, then led NDSU to a fourth straight national championship in 2014. He broke his wrist in 2015, missed eight games, came back to start the championship game, and NDSU won a fifth straight title. In April 2016, Philadelphia made him the second pick in the entire NFL Draft. The highest any FCS quarterback has ever been taken. He came from a place most scouts needed GPS to find, and he went second overall. That’s the door every NDSU quarterback has walked through since.

49 Wins. Three Losses. And He Still Got Drafted

Easton Stick went 49–3 as a starting quarterback. Not 49–3 for NDSU. Not 49–3 in the Missouri Valley. Forty-nine wins and three losses — the most wins ever by a starting quarterback in FCS history, shared with South Dakota State’s Mark Gronowski. The Los Angeles Chargers took him in the fifth round of the 2019 NFL Draft. He spent years as a backup in the NFL, always listed third or fourth on the depth chart, always “developmental,” always the guy the starter never had to worry about. Stick’s story is the quiet side of this pipeline. Not every one of these quarterbacks gets the second-overall pick. Some of them just win 49 games and grind it out on someone else’s roster for half a decade. The pipeline doesn’t promise stardom. It promises readiness. What happens after that is on you.

Trey Lance Needed One Season Too

Trey Lance appeared in 19 games across three seasons at NDSU, but like Payton, he really only had one year as the full starter. In 2019, he went 16–0, threw 28 touchdowns, ran for 14 more, completed 66.9% of his passes, and didn’t throw a single interception the entire season. One year. San Francisco took him third overall in 2021. The NFL scouts who worried about sample size — who said one season wasn’t enough — drafted him in the top three anyway, because one NDSU season, apparently, is worth more than three elsewhere. Cole Payton is writing the same story right now. One season. Four program records. The scouts know the template. They’ve seen it before.

What the Combine Measured That Surprised People

There’s a metric called Relative Athletic Score, it takes combine data across every measurable and plots a player against every player at his position going back to 1987. Cole Payton scored a 9.97 out of 10.00, fourth among all 1,054 quarterbacks measured since 1987. He ran a 4.56-second 40-yard dash at 6-foot-3, 232 pounds, posted the second-best vertical jump among all quarterbacks at 40 inches, and ran the 3-cone drill in 7.12 seconds. The concern going into Indianapolis was whether scouts would reduce him to a running quarterback, a gadget player, someone you use in packages instead of featuring as a starter. Analysts directly raised the possibility that his biggest obstacle might be the dual-threat label getting ahead of his passing ability that produced those four records. That’s not Payton’s limitation. That’s the evaluation system struggling to process someone who does both things and is genuinely good at both. The tape says passer. The combine said athlete. Both are true.

Ten Championships. All of Them Earned.

Between 2011 and 2024, North Dakota State won 10 FCS national championships — 10 of 14 available. Their all-time record in championship games is 10–1. They have beaten FBS opponents on the road, as the smaller school, against programs with bigger rosters and more money, including a win over Iowa in 2016 that Power conference fans haven’t forgotten. None of this happened because the competition was weak. South Dakota State plays in the same conference and hasn’t matched it. The Bison built something specific… a culture of process, patience, and delayed reward, and it has repeated itself under three different head coaches across fifteen years. Dynasties don’t survive coaching changes unless the system is bigger than any one man.

The Draft Is Coming. Then Everything Changes

Sometime in the next few weeks, Cole Payton’s name will be called. He’ll stand up, put on a hat, shake hands with a general manager, and if the projections hold, become the fifth NDSU quarterback drafted since 2016, tying Alabama, tying Ohio State, from a school in Fargo that gets 42 inches of snow a year. On July 1, 2026, North Dakota State joins the Mountain West Conference as a full FBS member — paying $12.5 million to enter and another $5 million in reclassification fees, with $25 million in donor commitments backstopping the move. Nevada. Boise State. Air Force. Wyoming. The dynasty as it existed ends, and whether the pipeline survives at a higher level is a question nobody has answered yet. But before all of that, there’s a kid from Omaha who sat on a bench for four years, waited his turn, set four program records in the only season he got, and walked out of Fargo the same way the ones before him did… ready.

Sources:
Pro Football Network – Cole Payton College Stats: The Numbers Behind NDSU’s Next NFL QB
NDSU Athletics – 2025 Football Cumulative Statistics
NDSU Athletics Official Facebook – 380 Yards Total Offense vs. South Dakota State (Oct. 25, 2025)
Las Vegas Raiders / Sports Illustrated – Raiders Draft QB Cam Miller in Sixth Round
NDSU Athletics Official X – Cam Miller Breaks Carson Wentz’s Single-Season Passing Yards Record
Fox Sports – Trey Lance, Carson Wentz Top Bevy of Pros Produced by North Dakota State