No Ceiling: Tarleton State’s Rise and Its FBS Ambitions

TARLETON, TX – The sprawling Tarleton State campus is almost unrecognizable to Todd Whitten, despite spending 16 of the last 30 years leading the Texans football program.  

When Whitten first arrived in 1996, there were just over 6,000 students and cars could drive straight through campus. The two or three blocks of on-campus houses, where 25 to 30 professors lived, were bulldozed and replaced with dormitories. Those dorms now help house some of the 28,000 current students. The school projects to pass 35,000 students in the 2030s.

And while the changes around campus are staggering, the evolution of the football program is jaw-dropping. Whitten, who is on his third stint as the head coach at Tarleton State, had a front row seat to both the growth of the university and the football program.

The Texans had just moved up to Division II from the NAIA a year before Whitten first became head coach in 1996. Back then, he only had 20 scholarships to divide amongst nearly 100 players. His staff consisted of him, an offensive line coach, a defensive coordinator, a secondary coach, and one GA for each side of the ball.

And they all taught classes in the morning. Whitten taught a “Coaching Football” course alongside three sessions of Walking Fitness. His defensive coordinator taught bowling from 9 a.m. to noon. Then they’d all hurry back to the athletic facilities, which looked nothing like they do now, to eat a quick lunch and prepare for afternoon practice.

“When we’d have a staff meeting there would be like five or six of us,” Whitten said. “Now, there are 20 or more in the room.”

The Texans traveled in one bus for away games and were followed by a smaller bus and a van that held equipment. They drove all over the country like a large jam band, returning to Stephenville when the sun was rising on Sunday mornings.

Almost none of them were on full scholarships, so most of his players worked at nights or on Sundays, some on campus mowing grass and doing landscaping on what was known as the “Toro Team.”

“We feed our guys (now),” Whitten said. “In the early days, they about starved. The only time we fed them back in those days was for a pregame meal.”

Oh, how have times changed.

If Tarleton State University was a stock, someone on television would be screaming “buy, buy, buy” into the camera. It’s the fastest growing public university in Texas, experiencing seven consecutive years of record growth.

Roughly $1.2 billion dollars has been pumped into campus growth and renovation with around $200 million going towards athletics. A medical school is in the works. There’s the main campus in Stephenville and satellite campuses in Fort Worth, Waco, and Bryan.

Dr. James Hurley arrived at Tarleton in August of 2019 and helped navigate the Texans into Division I, joining the FCS ranks as an independent in 2020. They joined the WAC in 2021 and helped morph that into the United Athletic Conference (UAC). Whitten called the COVID year “a blessing in disguise for football” because it helped get the Texans into a league with like-minded institutions.

Tarleton State won the Commissioner’s Cup in the UAC for the first time last year. The football team is ranked No. 1 in the FCS and on the doorstep of a second straight conference championship and third consecutive trip to the playoffs.

The program holds wins over FBS competition in consecutive seasons, beating Army in 2025 and Bowling Green in 2026, and are the winningest Division I program in Texas since 2019.

The top-ranked Texans are 9-0 this year heading into the clash with rival Abilene Christian. The two shared the UAC crown last year and the winner on Saturday night in Stephenville would likely claim the title in 2026. Tarleton State went 1-1 in each of the last two trips to the playoffs.

But Tarleton State is daring to dream bigger than conference championships. Sam Houston won the 2020 FCS national championship, which was technically played in the spring of 2021 because of COVID. That was an outlier for the region, however. Thirteen of the last 15 FCS national championships were won by a team from Montana or the Dakotas.

The Texans are among a group of teams in the south that could wrestle dominance away from those programs, however. SFA is ranked No. 2 in the nation. Lamar and ACU are in the Top 25 and were both in the playoffs last year.

“We want to be smart. We want to be calculated. We want to win the UAC,” athletic director Steve Uryasz said. “And we believe that this program can win a national championship. We believe that. From there, it’ll depend on our opportunities.”

To some, this might feel like the end of the race. But the reason that the Texans are enjoying so much success as a university and an athletics program is that the people in charge do not believe in ceilings. They only see possibility.

“We’re just getting started,” Hurley said.

The elephant in the room is a move to the FBS. And Tarleton State isn’t hiding from those possibilities.

North Dakota State, Sam Houston, and James Madison combined for 12 of the 15 FCS national championships since 2010 and all three now play FBS football. As does App State, which won three straight FCS national titles from 2005-2007, and Eastern Michigan, who won it in 2010.

The wins over Army and Bowling Green help Tarleton State’s case, but it is the investment and the alignment that serve as the university’s “big joker” in future conversations. Hurley says that his Texans would rank in the top three in facilities and revenue share in any of the conferences that they would join.

“We have to put ourselves into a position where that when those conferences expand, we’re at the top of their list,” Uryasz said. “We do that with winning, exposure, facilities, budget, rev-share, all the things that make you relevant and put yourself in a position to compete.

“So, that’s what we’re doing. We’re completely committed to the UAC, but I would also be disingenuous if I denied that our ultimate goal, at some point, is to move up in classifications.”

That doesn’t mean Tarleton State is desperate to move, however. They’ve seen other programs jump on the first train to the FBS station, only to be left wanting. They won’t move for movement’s sake and are willing to take their time to find the right dance partner, Hurley said. Being members of the Texas A&M system means Tarleton State has the backing to be picky.

The options are plentiful. Conference USA lost UTEP in 2025. The Sun Belt lost Texas State in 2026. Maybe the Mountain West wants a dance partner for UTEP? Or the Pac-12 for Texas State? What about the American Conference, which is home to three Texas schools? All are good options that could materialize quickly as the dominos move in the FBS.

When, or if, the Texans do move to FBS, they have the perfect man for that transition already on campus. He successfully navigated the move to Division II in 1996 and has done a Herculean job transitioning the Texans into the FCS.

He was excited to move to the Division I level and is one of the few coaches who doesn’t complain about the advent of the transfer portal or revenue share. He says his time as a Division II coach prepared him for the modern game. He split up 36 scholarships the same way he splits up his revenue sharing budget. He used to use JUCO recruits to maximize his roster in the same way he uses transfers today.

“All of these changes that seem chaotic for everybody else was just normal, business as usual for us.”

But Whitten is letting his bosses worry about the future. His focus is on 2026, and more specifically, the next game. He’ll talk at length about his past, on and off the field. He’ll reminisce about the old days at Tarleton State and how much his job has changed. But he doesn’t have much time to discuss the No. 1 ranking or a potential move to the FBS.

That’s not his job. It wasn’t then, and it isn’t now. He just views his role as the eye of the hurricane, where everything is calm in the middle of a raging storm.

“If you ever lose focus of what’s happening next Saturday, you’re going to start getting whipped in a hurry,” he said. “Nobody is safe, just look around the country. Look at the FBS, look at the FCS. There is no other option than to look at the next game.”