Ben McLaughlin’s team was 15 minutes from history when the phone in the Louisiana Christian head coach’s pocket began competing for his attention.The Wildcats had clawed back from a 27-14 halftime hole to take the lead, and his duties shifted to the calculations of a tight fourth quarter — points, downs and what would be the “longest three minutes of my life.”But first: Pizza Hut on the line.Postgame dinner was waiting somewhere outside the stadium, the delivery driver stranded with no idea where to put it.“I mean, come on, it’s not that hard,” McLaughlin recalled Friday, laughing. “I told him before the game, it’s the two buses. Just drop them off.”Louisiana Christian and Northwestern State are separated by barely 60 miles but several rungs of college football. McLaughlin’s Wildcats represent a small Baptist university playing football in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), not the NCAA; waiting at the other end of the highway was a Division I program.At Louisiana Christian, whatever needed solving tended to find McLaughlin — a player’s housing, a financial-aid snag or, on Thursday night, a wandering pizza order.When the food finally found its destination, McLaughlin turned back toward the field, where Northwestern State was about to make his evening considerably more complicated.The Demons shrunk the lead to five with 2:47 left. McLaughlin checked his clock-management sheet: two first downs would do it.Once quarterback Bryce Perkins dropped to a final knee, bedlam broke loose along McLaughlin’s sideline, with the scoreboard frozen at Louisiana Christian 42, Northwestern State 37.College football's Week 0 explainedIra GorawaraLouisiana Christian initially billed the victory as the first by an NAIA program over an NCAA Division I school that offers football scholarships. But Steve Wilson, the NAIA’s director of athletics communications, found at least 10 earlier such victories, among more than 30 known NAIA wins over Division I teams overall. Still, the Wildcats entered rare historical company.NAIA schools generally operate on a much smaller scale than Division I programs. Their football programs are permitted 24 scholarship equivalencies that can be divided across their rosters. Division I programs that opted into the settlement of the House v. NCAA antitrust lawsuits can offer scholarships to every player on a 105-player football roster, though FCS programs were traditionally capped at 63 scholarships. Louisiana Christian, a private Baptist university located in the central Louisiana city of Pineville, enrolled 936 students in fall 2024. Northwestern State, by comparison, counted nearly 7,800 students in spring 2026.Louisiana Christian practices before sunrise because its only field belongs to the men’s and women’s soccer teams, too, as part of a facility built in 2000. Coaches recruit and game plan before tending to jobs bigger programs parcel out to support staffers.