On the level, is UNC football playing in the correct place?

GREELEY» Keith Grable would set out on long runs in fall 2011 with plenty to think about while pounding the pavement around the University of Northern Colorado campus. It’s the school where he won back-to-back national championships as a player and the program he now serves as an assistant coach.

It became more emotional therapy than exercise by season’s end, though, as the once proud NCAA Division II powerhouse faced a new reality at the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly I-AA) level. Eleven games. Eleven losses. A championship tradition Grable lived in 1996 and 1997 was now a distant memory.

“I was out on my jogs shedding tears,” Grable said, “wondering, ‘What are we doing?’ ”

UNC travels to Boulder for a noon Saturday kickoff against the University of Colorado, their first meeting since 1934, with UNC an overwhelming underdog. Business as usual for the Bears. The program posted losing seasons in a dozen consecutive years from 2003-14, but it wasn’t always that way.

From 1990 to 2002, UNC earned eight D-II playoff berths and won two national titles. The decline since traces back to UNC’s 2003 jump to Division I in all sports, and again in 2006 with membership in the Big Sky Conference. The Bears wouldn’t post a winning record again until 2015 and 2016 with consecutive 6-5 seasons under Earnest Collins, whose first year as head coach was that winless 2011 season he would later call “My worst nightmare.”

The journey has prompted a familiar question: Did UNC make the right move leaving its D-II legacy for an uncertain

FCS future?

“Absolutely,” Collins said without hesitation.

Starting off slowly

Joe Glenn was the head coach who brought two national titles to Greeley, and before his departure in 2000 to do the same at Montana, there had not been discussions about UNC seeking a new division to dominate.

“They weren’t considering it,” Glenn said. “We were positioned, I think, right where we belonged at that time.”

But athletic director Jim Fallis had tripled the athletic department’s annual giftgiving program and helped to raise $3.5 million for improvements to Nottingham Field, its 8,533-seat on-campus stadium. University and athletic officials then came to a realization. Without a single FCS team in the state — CU, Colorado State and Air Force compete at the Football Bowl Subdivision of Division I— UNC had ample opportunity to quickly create its own niche in jumping divisions.

Change would come in waves as the athletic department transitioned 15 varsity sports to Division I play, especially for the football team, despite its tradition of success. Here’s how tough it got: When Collins — a former four-year starting UNC cornerback (199194) — returned as head coach in 2011, UNC football didn’t offer a full 63 scholarships for its players, em- ployed only seven full-time assistant coaches and had no graduate assistants.

“I don’t know if anybody talked to football coaches and said, ‘Hey, how is this going to work?’ ” Grable said.

Competing in the Big Sky with limited resources?

“It’s like you’re going in with a six-shooter,” Collins said, “and everybody else has machine guns.”

Current UNC athletic director Darren Dunn was hired in November 2013.

“The plan was, over time, to get it to where it would be fully funded,” Dunn said. “I really wasn’t part of that discussion, but I emphasized the importance of it when I arrived because there were still some discussions going on about it. The assistant coaches were a critical component when I first got here.”

After more than a decade as an FCS member, the football program has been fully funded for the past four seasons and, Collins believes, is poised for success.

“It could happen for us to do some special things,” he said.

Looking to the future

Through the course of UNC’s 1-11 season in 2013, one specific Sunday team meeting was called to assess the mood. A mission was posed among first-year players: “We’re going to stick it out and not leave.”

“That’s what we did,” said Ellis Onic, then a redshirt UNC receiver, and now a senior all-conference performer. “My whole senior class is here. Nobody left.”

Onic, a Dallas native, was in among the first out-ofstate talent waves that resulted from full-scholarship access. A roster once limited to almost entirely Colorado players now features talent from more than 20 states.

The jump to FCS has brought along the development of a fully staffed academic center, and Dunn said the football team posted its highest-ever GPA last semester (3.0). A facilities plan is also in place for the future construction of a 10,000- to 15,000-squarefoot weight room and multipurpose indoor training facility with private fundraising efforts.

“All those things would not happen if we weren’t Division I,” Dunn said.

Consecutive winning seasons have lifted UNC out of the Big Sky cellar for the first two times, even as the Bears were picked this preseason to finish ninth out of 13 in the media poll.

But one thing is for certain: The tradition of excellence has existed in Greeley before. So much that it prompts a certain “what if” from the assistant who no longer tears up on those long runs anymore.

“You look back and go, ‘Man, what if we were still in Division II?’ ” Grable said. “You still wonder, ‘Maybe we’d still be a powerhouse over the last decade.’ ”

But the head coach who started it all doesn’t play revisionist history.

“I respect it,” Glenn said. “I think that’s where they belong.”