Northern Colorado Bears football
intercollegiate American football team
The Northern Colorado Bears football program is the intercollegiate American football team for the University of Northern Colorado located in Greeley, Colorado. The team competes in the Big Sky Conference at the NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) level. The university's first football team was fielded in 1893. They joined Division I in 2004. The team plays home games at the 8,533 seat Nottingham Field on campus. The Bears announced the hiring of Ed Lamb on December 6, 2022, replacing Ed McCaffrey, who went 6–16 in two seasons.
Conference affiliations
Below is the list of conferences in which Northern Colorado has been a member.
Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference (1923–1971)
Great Plains Athletic Conference (1972–1975)
NCAA Division II independent (1976–1979)
North Central Conference (1980–2002)
Great West Football Conference (2004–2005)
Big Sky Conference (2006–present)
Championships
National championships
Northern Colorado made two appearances in the NCAA Division II National Championship Game. The Bears defeated Carson–Newman, 23–14 in 1996, and later defeated New Haven, 51–0 in 1997.
Conference championships
† Co-champions
Division championships
Playoff appearances
NCAA Division II
The Bears appeared in the Division II playoffs nine times with an overall record of 12–7.
“Northern Colorado Bears football” enters the record as intercollegiate American football team. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Northern, Colorado and Bears can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7058248. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1893, 2004, 2022 and 1923.
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This entry incorporates text from “Northern Colorado Bears football” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.