Current schools: Cal Poly (football only), Eastern Washington, Idaho, Idaho State, Montana, Montana State, Northern Arizona, Northern Colorado, Portland State, Southern Utah, UC Davis (football only), Utah Tech^*Officially adopted that name on July 1, 2022. Located in St. George, the largest city in what's called "Utah's Dixie", so named because its earliest white settlers were Mormon converts from the Deep South. The school had "Dixie" in its name for over a century as it evolved from a church academy to a public junior college and finally a four-year university. It entered the NCAA as the Dixie State Rebels in 2006, a name that confused most people who didn't know the region's history, and the Confederate connotations of that branding led the school to first change its nickname (to the Red Storm, then after a few years, the Trailblazers), then finally its name. Ironically, its instate (non-football) rival Utah Valley was once called Utah Technical College., Weber State
Headquarters: Farmington, UT
Current commissioner: Tom Wistroll
Reigning champion: Montana State
Website: bigskyconf.com

Formed in 1963, the Big Sky Conference is one of the better FCS conferences—for one, the reigning FCS champion Montana State plays here. Popular among Western schools seeking easy wins, though two of its teams have delivered upsets over ranked FBS programs (Eastern Washington against Oregon State in 2013, Montana against Washington in 2021). The Medal of Dishonor in this respect would however go to North Texas, which ended up on the wrong end of a 66–7 shellacking by Portland State in 2015. At the Mean Green's homecoming.^note The loss, the largest ever by an FBS team to an FCS team, was so humiliating that North Texas fired its head coach on the spot. The home of Boise State before it moved to the FBS, the Big Sky still has a notorious oddly-colored field, in this case Eastern Washington's red field, nicknamed "The Inferno". Idaho State's ICCU Dome^note "ICCU" is an abbreviation for Idaho Central Credit Union. (originally the Minidome and later Holt Arena) is the oldest on-campus domed stadium in America, built in 1970. Two other conference teams play in domes: Idaho (the Kibbie Dome,^*One of the rejected names for it was the Palouse Pea Palace. Before it picked up a corporate sponsorship in 2023 and officially became the P1FCU Kibbie Dome, it also had an overly long official name of William H. Kibbie–ASUI Activity Center. Both names would be even longer if they were spelled out (respectively Potlatch No. 1 Federal Credit Union and Associated Students of the University of Idaho). built in 1975) and Northern Arizona (the Walkup Skydome, built in 1977, not because of extreme heat, as you might guess, but because of the cold temperatures and heavy snow in the mountain city of Flagstaff). NAU's stadium, at 6,980 feet, has the highest elevation of any in FCS, and is second only to Wyoming in all of D-I. Montana State has won national championships at the NAIA (1956)^note Technically a shared title with St. Joseph's (Indiana), since the game ended in a scoreless tie, D-II (1976), and FCS (1984, 2025) levels, making it the only team to win titles in three different classifications.

Idaho rejoined the Big Sky in 2014 (after an 18-year absence) but without its football team, which (as mentioned above) returned to the Sun Belt; however, after the Sun Belt decided to drop Idaho after 2017, the school decided to take up the Big Sky's standing invitation to return its football team to that league. The Vandals became the first team ever to voluntarily drop from FBS to FCS without extenuating circumstances.^note McNeese and Yale chose to take the drop when the rest of their respective conferences were bounced to I-AA in 1982. Southern Utah left the Big Sky in 2022 to join the WAC and its revived football league (and become part of the United Athletic Conference in 2023).

The Big Sky is home to the largest football-sponsoring school outside FBS in UC Davis, with about 32,000 undergraduates.^note At least two schools in lower divisions, plus two other D-I schools apart from Arizona State and Liberty, have larger total enrollments than Davis' 41K, and both of said D-I schools have larger undergrad enrollments than Davis' 32K, but they don't count for various reasons. D-II Southern New Hampshire has over 135,000 total students, but only about 4,000 are actual on-campus students; its online operation is a little larger than Liberty's. D-III NYU has over 50,000 students but its enrollment is split nearly evenly between undergraduates and postgraduates, the latter of which will normally have exhausted any athletic eligibility they may have had. Neither has a football team. Grand Canyon, a non-football Mountain West Conference member, has a bit more than 25K on-campus students but has an online operation that puts its total enrollment a bit over 100K. The largest non-FBS school by (on-campus) undergraduate enrollment in 2025–26 is another non-football school, Utah Valley (nearly 44K), and another non-football school, UC San Diego, has about 34K. However, Davis may not be long for Big Sky football, having announced during the 2024 playoffs that it would join the Mountain West Conference in 2026 as a full but non-football member. The school didn't rule out a move to FBS and MW football should funding allow. Another recent change involved longtime member Sacramento State, another school with a big undergrad enrollment (about 28K). In April 2025, Sac State, which has a new football stadium in the planning stages and an ambitious fundraising project, applied to transition to FBS as an independent. Because the Hornets didn't yet have an invite from an FBS conference, the NCAA needed to issue a waiver similar to the one Liberty got a few years back, but the D-I Council rejected the request in late June. Meanwhile, Sac State went ahead and announced a move from the Big Sky to the Big West for all sports except football in 2026, with the university president saying "We're full steam ahead and we still plan to be playing FBS football in 2026," after the NCAA rejection, seemingly hinting at possible legal action against the NCAA. In the end, no legal action came about after Sac State got a football-only invite from the Mid-American Conference. The Big Sky decided to reload by adding the two Utah schools that didn't go in on the reorganization of the Atlantic Sun and WAC (see the United Athletic Conference folder), Southern Utah (previously a Big Sky member from 2012–22) and Utah Tech, also in 2026.

Current schools: Albany, Bryant, Campbell, Elon^*Elon is merging with Queens (the D-I non-football one in Charlotte) in 2026, with Elon operating Queens as a Charlotte campus. Both campuses plan to continue fielding separate athletic programs., Hampton, Maine, Monmouth, New Hampshire, North Carolina A&T, Rhode Island, Sacred Heart, Stony Brook, Towson
Headquarters: Richmond, VA
Current commissioner: Joe D'Antonio
Reigning champion: Rhode Island
Website: caasports.com

CAA Football is the football arm of the Coastal Athletic Association (or just CAA). Legally, CAA Football and the all-sports CAA are separate entities, but both share the same administration.^note The NCAA considers the football conference part of the all-sports CAA, but the CAA itself treats the football league as separate. The all-sports CAA was created in 1979 as the basketball-only ECAC South Conference.^note The ECAC is the Eastern College Athletic Conference, a huge (over 200 schools) multi-sports consortium founded in 1938 that no longer sponsors football or basketball at the NCAA Division I level. On the basketball side, the ECAC had begun sponsoring regional tournaments in 1975, with the winners getting automatic bids to the NCAA tournament, but the NCAA leaned on the ECAC to formalize the regions into conferences with regular season round-robin play. Some schools balked at being lumped in with the lesser-funded schools in their localized regions, and several broke away from the ECAC to form both the Atlantic 10 and Big East conferences. A few conferences still organized under the ECAC banner, but by 1981 the ECAC decided to do away with the regional tournament format, and the conferences gradually spun off into separate organizations: the ECAC South is now the CAA, the ECAC North became the current America East Conference, and the ECAC Metro became the Northeast Conference and still later just the NEC. It added other sports in 1985 and became the Colonial Athletic Association, but did not start sponsoring football until 2007. However, CAA Football can trace its history to the late 1930s through three other leagues,^note (though it ignores the earliest of said leagues) including the Yankee Conference, one of the charter members of I-AA in 1978, though it's been the division's Revolving Door Band. Of the 1978 Yankee Conference teams, only Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island remain. Historically, it has been one of the better FCS leagues. In 2010, James Madison defeated then-#13 Virginia Tech in the second win by an FCS team over a ranked FBS team. The same school ended North Dakota State's five-year reign as FCS champions in the 2016 semifinals on the way to the FCS crown. (NDSU got its revenge by beating JMU in the 2017 and 2019 title games.) A decent chunk of the schools in CAA Football are not members of the all-sports CAA. As of the 2026 season, only Campbell, Elon, Hampton, Monmouth, North Carolina A&T, Stony Brook, and Towson are members of both sides. William & Mary had also been in this group before leaving CAA Football for the Patriot League in 2026 while staying in the all-sports CAA. The all-sports CAA has five members without football teams (College of Charleston, Drexel, Hofstra, Northeastern, and UNC Wilmington), with a sixth (Fairfield) joining in 2027.

Villanova, which thanks to its basketball success had the highest-profile athletic brand of any CAA football school before following W&M to Patriot League football in 2026, flirted with a move to the FBS around 2011, but the increased financial commitment, lack of a proper sized stadium, and the collapse of the Big East as a football conference led them to back down. But then in 2021, James Madison, which had also been eyeing an FBS move for a while, finally made the jump and accepted an invite to the Sun Belt, dealing the CAA a major blow. While JMU initially planned to join the Sun Belt in 2023, the move was pushed forward to 2022 after the all-sports CAA chose to enforce a provision in its bylaws stating that any school that announces its departure can be banned from the conference's postseason tournaments.^*JMU was still eligible for the 2021 CAA Football title because that league's bylaws lacked said provision. The all-sports CAA has since changed its bylaws on this point, no longer banning departing members from its conference tournaments. The CAA reloaded shortly thereafter, bringing football member Stony Brook into the all-sports league and also poaching Campbell, Hampton, Monmouth, and North Carolina A&T for both sides of the league and Bryant for football only to expand its football membership to 13 effective in 2022, 15 in 2023 (when it adopted its current name), and 16 in 2024. (A&T joined the all-sports CAA in 2022 but didn't join for football until 2023.) The 16-team lineup lasted only one season, as Delaware started a transition to FBS in 2024 and joined Conference USA in 2025, while Richmond moved football to the Patriot League for 2025, and Villanova and W&M followed suit in 2026. At the same time, Sacred Heart ended its two-year stint as an FCS independent and joined CAA Football.

Current schools: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, Yale
Current commissioner: Robin Harris^note titled as "Executive Director"
Headquarters: Princeton, NJ
Reigning champions: Harvard, Yale (automatic bid) – co-champions
Website: ivyleague.com

Boasting some of the most famous universities in the world, let alone America, the Ivy League is of course better known for its academic prowess than its athletic programs, but the "Ancient Eight" has a deep sports tradition. While the league considers 1954 as its founding date, the member schools had agreed on common policies and scheduling in football in 1945,^note Before recommitting to the Ivy group in 1954, Penn briefly flirted with breaking away and competing on a more national level. It was also involved in the aborted plans for an "airplane conference" around 1959 that also included the likes of Penn State, Notre Dame, UCLA, and USC. and it claims the history of the Eastern Intercollegiate Basketball League, founded in 1901, and the near-century of football played by its schools prior to the formal organization of the League. Historically, the Ivies were the powerhouse of college football (with Princeton, Yale, and Harvard being especially good and Harvard-Yale serving as the Ur-Example of rivalry games)^note Although traditional powers today, Michigan and Notre Dame were both considered unique anomalies in their early history by being able to field good football teams outside of the Ivies' then-monopoly on the sport, but the schools' collective decision to emphasize academics over athletics in the post-World War II era has made this a relic of the past. Princeton lays claim to 28 national championships, more than any other school by a considerable margin, but the last they won was in 1950. The league remained classified as a major conference until the NCAA's 1982 re-realignment of D-I. Yale actually met the attendance requirement to remain in I-A but voluntarily reclassified to keep the league intact.

One artifact of the Ivies' former glory is that they have some of the oldest and largest stadiums in FCS. Only Columbia and Dartmouth have stadiums that seat less than 20,000, with the Yale Bowl (at just over 61,000 seats) being the largest on-campus stadium outside of the Power 4 conferences.^note Notre Dame, with a considerably larger venue, is considered Power 4 despite being a football independent, seeing that it's otherwise an ACC member with an extensive cross-scheduling agreement with that conference. Penn's Franklin Field (built in 1895) and Harvard Stadium (built in 1903) were among the first large college stadiums (the former having also served for many years as the NFL Eagles' stadium), and the Yale Bowl (built in 1914) is where the term "bowl" originated in its football sense.^note The Rose Bowl stadium was modeled after the Yale Bowl, and didn't open until October 1922. While the Rose Bowl Game dates to 1902, the 1923 edition was the first to actually be called "Rose Bowl"; before then, it was officially the "Tournament East–West Game". Only Columbia's Wien Stadium and Princeton Stadium were built after 1925, respectively opening in 1984 and 1998. Other football mainstays with Ivy roots include the winged helmet, invented by coach Fritz Crisler at Princeton, then taken with him when he became HC at Michigan (something a few Michigan fans aren't thrilled to be reminded of), and soccer-style kicking, first popularized by kicker Pete Gogolak at Cornell and his younger brother Charlie at Princeton.

For almost a century, a major distinction for the league was its refusal to play postseason games, citing academic concerns; Columbia's 1933 Rose Bowl win marked the last Ivy postseason action of the 20th century. The NCAA gave the league an automatic berth in the FCS playoffs, but they chose not to participate, making football the only sport in which Ivy League members couldn't compete for national championships. Rumors suggested that Harvard, Princeton and Yale were dead set against playoff participation, which needed a unanimous vote to happen. Then, during the 2024 playoffs, a shock announcement from the league stated the conference's presidents had approved a proposal by its student-athletes council to allow football postseason play beginning the next season. Yale (autobid) and Harvard (at-large) were the first Ivy playoff participants in 2025; Harvard was trounced in the first round by Villanova, but Yale upset Youngstown State on the road and took eventual national champ Montana State to the wire before falling 21–13. The playoff participation didn't affect the league's other key distinction, limiting themselves to 10 games each season instead of the 12 now allowed for FCS members. Most notably, the Ivies do not allow athletic scholarships, though student-athletes are eligible for the same financial assistance based on need or academic merit as the rest of the student body (which, at schools that charge upwards of $50,000 in tuition, is usually necessary). Some outside observers feel that financial aid to athletes amounts to scholarships under a different name.

Current schools: Delaware State, Howard, Morgan State, Norfolk State, North Carolina Central, South Carolina State
Headquarters: Norfolk, VA
Current commissioner: Sonja Stills
Reigning champion: South Carolina State
Website: meacsports.com

Formed in 1970, the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) is a conference of HBCU institutions. Like the MAC and Sun Belt in FBS, its colleges are often scheduled as easy wins. Savannah State, in particular, was criticized for regularly agreeing to play in vastly one-sided games against powerhouse schools, where they inevitably lost by over 70 or 80 points before dropping back to D-II in 2019. Due to a distinct lack of success in the FCS playoffs (no national championships^note Florida A&M was an independent when it won the 1978 title and just 5 playoff wins total), it decided in 2015 to vacate its automatic bid to the FCS playoffs (for the second time in the FCS era), opting instead to send its champion to the Celebration Bowl in Atlanta to play the SWAC (below) champion (the MEAC and SWAC champs had previously squared off in the Heritage Bowl from 1991-99). A non-champion is still eligible for an at-large playoff invitation if the selection committee deems them worthy, and North Carolina A&T in 2017 and North Carolina Central in 2023 have received one. On a happier note, the MEAC was involved in the biggest point-spread upset in NCAA football history in 2017, which happened, appropriately enough, in Las Vegas, when Howard, a 45-point underdog, beat UNLV 43–40. After the 2024 season, two MEAC teams received huge publicity by hiring former NFL greats as head coaches: Michael Vick at Norfolk State and DeSean Jackson at Delaware State, with both schools playing Follow the Leader after the previous HBCU coaching success of Deion Sanders (Jackson State) and Eddie George (Tennessee State).

Two full MEAC members, Coppin State and Maryland Eastern Shore, don't play football.^note UMES, formerly Maryland State, had a team until 1979, with NFL legend Art Shell and E Street Band sax man Clarence Clemons among its former players. It now has a women's flag football team (see below for more on that sport). Coppin State has never had varsity football, but has a club team. Since 2017, five football schools have left the conference—Hampton for the Big South in 2018; Savannah State for D-II in 2019 (after having only upgraded from D-II in 2010); and three schools in 2021, with Bethune–Cookman and Florida A&M leaving for the SWAC and North Carolina A&T for the Big South. Needless to say, these moves raised serious questions about the future of MEAC football. Howard had all-sport membership offers from the CAA and NEC in 2022, but turned both conferences down, while Chicago State, at the time a non-football school^*It started football in 2026. without a conference, offered itself up as a member but got voted down by the league's chancellors, and eventually joined the NEC for 2024 and beyond.^note CSU isn't an HBCU school, but it's long had a Black-majority student body and is part of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. Also in 2022 the MEAC announced an agreement with the NEC to place MEAC schools as associate NEC members in three sports (baseball and men's and women's golf) that the MEAC doesn't sponsor, leading to speculation that it might be the first step toward a full merger of the leagues; watch this space. That said, the MEAC started sponsoring women's golf in 2026–27, though all MEAC schools that had housed women's golf in the NEC are still affiliates in at least one other sport.

Also of note: The MEAC became the first Division I conference to officially sponsor women's flag football, launching a conference championship in spring 2027.^note The Big South Conference, discussed in the OVC folder as a de facto football partner of that conference, was the first to announce sponsorship of that sport, but the MEAC beat it to actual sponsorship. In very recent years, with heavy NFL backing, flag football has explosively grown as a women's college sport. This growth was even further juiced by the NCAA's January 2026 addition of that sport as one of its "emerging sports for women", giving it a leg up on future NCAA championship status. Later that same year, the NCAA recommended that all three of its divisions add it as an official championship sport, with the possibility of an inaugural championship in spring 2028.

Current schools: Illinois State, Indiana State, Murray State, North Dakota, Northern Iowa, South Dakota, South Dakota State, Southern Illinois, Youngstown State
Headquarters: St. Louis, MO
Current commissioner: Jeff Jackson
Past commissioner of note (and the only one): Patty Viverito
Reigning champion: North Dakota State
Website: valley-football.org

Another football-only league, the Missouri Valley Football Conference (or MVFC) has a history that is, to say the least, a Continuity Snarl. While the MVFC claims 1985 as its founding date, its history can be traced through two branches dating back as far as 1907, and involves four other conferences—one being the now non-football Missouri Valley Conference (note the missing word!) and another being a women's sports league. Nonetheless, it's at or near the top of the FCS pecking order, and its top teams are often competitive with the bottom half or so of FBS (with now-former member North Dakota State in particular standing out). The FCS championship game has twice been an all-MVFC affair, making it the only conference to pull off that feat (involving North Dakota State both times, with the Bison beating Illinois State in 2014 and losing to South Dakota State in 2022). The conference is also notable for its founding commissioner Patty Viverito, who served from its creation until retiring after the 2024 season.

Though the MVFC and MVC are separate entities, they share a very close relationship, operating out of the same office complex in St. Louis. The MVFC adopted a new governing structure in May 2025 that formalized the ties between the two conferences, and also brought the non-football Summit League (another of the four conferences alluded to above) into the fold. Both the MVC and Summit are now represented in MVFC governance, with the top two positions held by the commissioners of the two multi-sport conferences. Reportedly, all football-sponsoring Summit members (present and future) will have a guaranteed MVFC place. Of the 9 MVFC members in the 2026 season, all but one belong to one of the partner leagues—Illinois State, Indiana State, Murray State, Northern Iowa, and Southern Illinois in the MVC, and the three Dakotas schools in the Summit.^note  The exception is Youngstown State, whose main home is the Horizon League. Two other MVC members (Drake and Valparaiso) and Summit member St. Thomas play in the Pioneer Football League, which also operates out of that St. Louis office complex.

The MVFC is home to the other three FCS schools that play in domes, namely Northern Iowa (the UNI-Dome, pronounced "uni-dome"), North Dakota (the Alerus Center), and South Dakota (the DakotaDome). South Dakota has a similar stadium setup to that of ACC member Boston College; USD's domed stadium and basketball arena are physically attached, and some luxury boxes allow their occupants a full view of events at each venue.

The conference has seen a small bit of churn in the current decade, with the biggest move of the bunch coming in 2026. Murray State's arrival in 2023 (after joining the MVC in 2022) coincided with Western Illinois' departure from the Summit League for the OVC. WIU played one last season in the MVFC before joining the OVC–Big South alliance in 2024. The latter year saw Missouri State start its FBS transition, with a move to Conference USA following in 2025. Then in 2026, the 900-pound gorilla of FCS, 10-time national champ North Dakota State, left for Mountain West football while keeping its other sports in the Summit.

Current schools: Central Connecticut, Duquesne (football only), LIU, Mercyhurst, New Haven, Robert Morris (football only), Stonehill, Wagner
Arriving schools: Chicago State (2027)^note Already an NEC member; see more below.
Headquarters: Somerset, NJ
Current commissioner: Noreen Morris
Reigning champion: Central Connecticut
Website: necsports.com

Formed in 1981,^note As the ECAC Metro Conference; see the note in the CAA folder for more details on the ECAC and its local conferences. the NEC, known as the Northeast Conference before October 2025, did not sponsor football until 1996. It is in the lower tier of FCS, largely because it restricts football scholarships to a shade over two-thirds of the FCS maximum (45 instead of 63). As of the 2026 season, the only full NEC members that don't play football are Fairleigh Dickinson^note The D-I program at the school's "Metropolitan" campus in Teaneck, New Jersey, that is. The "Florham" campus thirty miles away in Madison is a member of the D-III Middle Atlantic Conference and does play football. and Le Moyne (see below). Chicago State, which joined in 2024, is starting a football program in 2026, playing its first season as an independent before joining NEC football in 2027. Until fairly recently, those ranks included three other schools: LIU Brooklyn, Mount St. Mary's, and St. Francis Brooklyn.^note Formally St. Francis College ("Saint" officially abbreviated). First, Long Island University merged the Brooklyn athletic program with the D-II LIU Post program (which did play football) into a single D-I LIU program effective in 2019–20. The football team that played as the LIU Post Pioneers in 2018 accordingly became the LIU Sharks. As for Mount St. Mary's, it left the NEC in 2022 for another non-football league, the Metro Conference (known before 2026 as the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference). St. Francis Brooklyn shut down its entire athletic program at the end of the 2022–23 school year, and the conference quickly replaced them with Le Moyne, a longtime D-II Jesuit school in suburban Syracuse, New York, whose signature sport is lacrosse. Merrimack and Sacred Heart announced their departure for the MAAC/Metro effective in 2024, and both chose to become FCS independents for the time being. (Sacred Heart would join CAA Football in 2026.) The NEC shored up its football numbers for 2024 by bringing back Robert Morris, which had been in NEC football from its start in 1996 until leaving after the 2019 season, as a football associate, and picking up another D-II upgrader, Mercyhurst from Pennsylvania (it was already D-I in hockey, having moved up in 1999, but shut down its men's hockey team in 2026).^note  Both RMU and the other football associate, Duquesne, are NEC members in an additional sport. Duquesne is also a member in the niche sport of women's bowling, while RMU joined for men's lacrosse at the same time it joined for football. These additions proved prescient, as Saint Francis (of Pennsylvania)^note Formally Saint Francis University ("Saint" spelled out). It had been the fifth smallest school in the FCS by enrollment, with about 1,500 undergraduates. Only Mississippi Valley State, Wagner, VMI, and Presbyterian are smaller.announced in March 2025 that it was eliminating athletic scholarships and moving to Division III starting in 2026, citing financial issues as well as concerns over things like NIL and the transfer portal. A few weeks later, the league found a replacement in yet another D-II upgrader, New Haven, for 2025, though due to the addition being announced so close to the football season, the Chargers didn't play a full NEC football schedule that season. Speaking of the Chargers, they also have an unusually colored football field—blue with yellow end zones; they licensed the blue part from Boise State and per the agreement call their field "blue and yellow".

The 2023 season was the first in which Merrimack, which joined the conference in all sports from D-II in 2019, was eligible for the FCS playoffs (and its only NEC season of playoff eligibility). Stonehill, which made the same move in 2022, became eligible in 2025 thanks to a D-I rule change that drops the transition period from D-II from four years to three. This rule change also makes Mercyhurst eligible in 2027 instead of 2028, and New Haven will become eligible in 2028. Stonehill replaced Bryant, which left for the non-football America East Conference in 2022 and parked football in the Big South, thereby becoming part of the Big South–OVC football alliance in 2023 (and moving from there to CAA Football in 2024). As alluded to above, Chicago State (starting football in 2026), Mercyhurst (all sports), New Haven (also all-sports), and Robert Morris (football plus men's lacrosse) effectively replaced Merrimack and Sacred Heart.

The NEC is also notable for its unusually large number of associate members—a whopping 21, spread across 14 different sports (counting men's and women's sports separately, as the NCAA does). Before 2026–27, it had the most such members of any D-I conference, but it's now one behind the Atlantic Sun Conference. However, the ASUN picked up many of these associates thanks to it sharing an administrative structure with the United Athletic Conference (see below); the ASUN sponsors several sports the United doesn't, and all United members have guaranteed ASUN places in those sports. However, the ASUN only has associates in 7 sports to the NEC's 14.^note Among FBS conferences, the MAC has the most such members with 19, with the Big 12 leading the Power Four with 15.

Current schools: Charleston Southern (football only), Eastern Illinois, Gardner–Webb (football only), Lindenwood, Southeast Missouri, Tennessee State, UT Martin, Western Illinois
Headquarters: Brentwood, TN
Current commissioner: Matt Wilson
Past commissioners of note: Jim Delany, Jon Steinbrecher
Reigning champion: Tennessee Tech
Website: ovcsports.com

The Ohio Valley Conference (OVC), established in 1948, was a powerhouse in the early years of I-AA before receding to the middle of the pack. Jacksonville State (the one in Alabama, and now in FBS) did play in the 2015 FCS title game as an OVC member. OVC schools are popular for southern schools seeking an easy win. It had operated a football-only alliance with the Big South Conference from 2023–25, initially the "Big South–OVC Football Association" before taking its final form as the "OVC–Big South Football Association". This alliance initially followed the model that the ASUN and WAC used in 2021 and 2022 before merging for football in 2023 (see the United Athletic Conference below), with both leagues playing full in-conference schedules plus a partially interlocking set of inter-conference games and sharing a single automatic playoff berth.

The Big South began in 1983 as a non-football league and did not sponsor the sport until 2002. Comprised initially of schools from throughout the Carolinas and Virginia, it usually had one or two good teams with a bunch of bottom-feeders, but most of the "good teams" left during the various realignments of the 2010s (most notably Coastal Carolina and Liberty). Six full members of the conference (High Point, Longwood, Radford, UNC Asheville, USC Upstate, and Winthrop) don't have football teams. Another full member, Campbell, played in the Pioneer Football League (below) through the 2017 season, but...

In an attempt to attract new football members, the Big South announced a football alliance with the ASUN Conference in 2016. With defections since 2014 of its biggest football schools, the Big South was in danger of losing its status as an FCS conference, as 6 members are needed for a league to maintain its automatic playoff berth. Under its terms, any current member of either league that added football or upgraded from non-scholarship to scholarship football had a guaranteed football home in the Big South.^note The offer also applied to any future members, as long as they're located within the current geographic footprint of the two leagues. It has held on since then, regularly swapping members to meet minimum requirements for operation. However, with the ASUN starting football in 2022 (taking two Big South football members with it) and Hampton moving on to the CAA, the Big South was put on the clock to restore its football membership to the "magic number" of 6... and its task got harder when North Carolina A&T announced it would move to CAA Football in 2023 (with the rest of its sports joining in 2022). However, it was able to lure Bryant as a new football-only member in time for the 2022 season. Still later, Campbell announced that it too would leave for both sides of the CAA in 2023, Bryant announced it would join CAA Football in 2024, and Robert Morris announced that it would return to NEC football in 2024.

On the OVC side of the ledger, Tennessee State was the only Division I HBCU school not in either the MEAC or SWAC, before Hampton and North Carolina A&T decided to leave the MEAC. TSU made history in 2023 as Notre Dame's first-ever FCS opponent.^note Also notable since both head coaches—UND's Marcus Freeman and TSU's Eddie George—were Black. TSU is also notable as the only FCS team that regularly plays home games in an NFL stadium, namely the Tennessee Titans' Nissan Stadium.

One full OVC member, Morehead State, plays football in the Pioneer League. Two other full members don't play football at all, namely SIU Edwardsville and Southern Indiana.

The OVC has gone through significant churn in the current decade. Founding OVC member Eastern Kentucky and Jacksonville State left in 2021 for the ASUN Conference, playing the season as de facto members of the new WAC football league before the ASUN started its own league in 2022. In July, another founding member, Murray State, left for the Missouri Valley Conference (not to be confused with the MVFC above), with non-football member Belmont joining them in this move, and Austin Peay left for the ASUN. Murray State, however, did keep football in the OVC for the 2022 season while it sought to join the MVFC, eventually being accepted into that league for 2023.

Three new members arrived in 2022, although only one of them plays football. Little Rock, a non-football Sun Belt member for over 30 years, saw the writing on the wall with the SBC's coming football expansion and moved to the OVC. Two D-II upgraders, football-sponsoring Lindenwood (out of the St. Louis area) and non-football Southern Indiana, also arrived. While all this was going on, the OVC and the Southland Conference, another league that experienced major membership losses, announced a football scheduling alliance for 2022 and 2023... but then the OVC and Big South announced their more comprehensive football alliance. In 2024, the alliance added Western Illinois, which became a full OVC member in 2023. WIU is probably most notable for its nickname of Leathernecks—which does come from the Marines, with permission.^note In 1927, the Marines' parent organization, the Department of the Navy, okayed Western's use of the nickname, as well as the Marine seal and bulldog mascot. The team's HC and AD at the time, Roy Hanson, was a highly decorated Marine veteran of World War I, and was serving as a Marine reservist. WIU's football stadium bears his name. As an aside, Western didn't use Leathernecks for its women's teams until 2008, instead calling them Westerwinds. The churn hasn't stopped. First, Tennessee Tech—the longest-tenured OVC football member,^note The only remaining charter OVC member, Morehead State, no longer plays OVC football, instead playing in the Pioneer Football League. having joined only a year after the conference's establishment—announced its departure for the Southern Conference in 2026. Then, non-football Little Rock announced it would also leave in 2026 for the United Athletic Conference. With Charleston Southern and Gardner–Webb having been the Big South's only representatives in the alliance since 2024, both conferences agreed that the alliance would revert to solely an OVC affair in 2026, with CS and GW remaining as OVC football affiliates.

The Big South has one more football-related claim to fame. In March 2026, it announced it would start sponsoring women's flag football in 2027–28, becoming the first D-I conference to make such an announcement—though the MEAC beat the Big South in actually sponsoring the sport. Five full members are either already sponsoring that variant or have committed to do so in the very near future.

Current schools: Bucknell, Colgate, Fordham (football only), Georgetown (football only), Holy Cross, Lafayette, Lehigh, Richmond (football only), Villanova (football only), William & Mary (football only)^note Army and Navy also call the Patriot League their primary conference.
Headquarters: Center Valley, PA
Current commissioner: Jennifer Heppel
Reigning champion: Lehigh
Website: patriotleague.org

Founded in 1986 as the football-only Colonial League, it became the Patriot League in 1990 when it added other sports. Basically an "Ivy League Lite"—its members are relatively small^note only Boston University, which no longer has a football team, and incoming football-only member Villanova have over 10,000 undergrads, academically strong schools, though not quite at the Ivy level. The league was actually founded to give the Ivies a chance to fill out their football schedules with schools that shared their academic focus. The conference did not allow athletic scholarships at all until permitting them for basketball in 1996 (allegedly to keep Holy Cross from jumping ship).^explanation Holy Cross has a storied men's basketball history, including the 1947 NCAA title and Boston Celtics legend Bob Cousy as its most famous player, but has long grappled with balancing academic standing with athletics success, even turning down an invitation to become a charter member of the Big East when it first formed as a basketball league. By The '90s, there were rumblings that Holy Cross wanted to revive that tradition and dump the Patriot League, but since HC gives the PL a presence in the crucial Greater Boston market, the league finally caved on the scholarship issue to retain their membership. Scholarships were extended to all non-football sports in 2001, but football scholarships were not allowed until 2013^note Fordham actually started giving them out in 2010, which created the scenario where they were still a member of the league but were ineligible for the league title and their opponents' games against them didn't count towards their league records. Once the other schools started giving them out, they were eligible once again and won the title in 2014., and Georgetown still doesn't award football scholarships. The Patriot League has participated in the FCS postseason since 1997, which the Ivies didn't do until 2025. The league has only reached the championship game once: Colgate in 2003. They lost 40–0 to Delaware.^note Before the league was formed, Lehigh played in the 1979 championship game, losing 30–7 to Eastern Kentucky. It's also home to the most-played and longest continuous rivalry in all of college football, namely Lafayette–Lehigh. The Leopards and Mountain Hawks played their 161st game in 2025, and have played at least once in each season since 1897.^note From their first matchup in 1884 to 1901, they played twice in each season except in 1891, when they played three times, and 1896, when they didn't play at all. They didn't play in calendar 2020 thanks to COVID-19, but played during the Patriot League's rescheduled spring 2021 season. The PL added a new football member in 2025 with the arrival of Richmond, which remains a member of the non-football Atlantic 10 Conference, from CAA Football (UR housed its women's golf team in the PL from 2014–15 until the A-10 started sponsoring that sport in 2024–25). This was followed a year later by Richmond's in-state rival William & Mary and Big East member Villanova joining the Spiders in PL football, with W&M otherwise staying in the all-sports CAA.

Depending on definitions, new PL football member Villanova has a claim to the most NCAA D-I team titles of any FCS school, with 21 in all,^note 13 in cross country (9 women's, 4 men's), 4 in men's track & field (3 indoor, 1 outdoor), 3 in men's basketball, and one FCS title in 2009. though Yale has a separate claim to this honor.^note The NCAA credits Yale with 29 titles in all, surpassing Nova. However, only 9 of these were actually awarded by the NCAA. The other 20 are men's golf titles awarded by the National Intercollegiate Golf Association before the NCAA launched its own men's golf championship in 1939. The NCAA recognizes pre-1939 NIGA titles as its own.

Five more schools are full members but don't play Patriot League football. Army and Navy play in the FBS American Conference, while American University (dropped football in 1941), Boston University^note not to be confused with the FBS Boston College (dropped it in 1997) and Loyola University Maryland (dropped it in 1933) no longer field football teams.

Current schools: Butler, Davidson, Dayton, Drake, Marist, Morehead State, Presbyterian, St. Thomas, San Diego, Stetson, Valparaiso
Headquarters: St. Louis, MO
Current commissioner: Greg Walter
Reigning champion: Drake
Website: pioneer-football.org

The Pioneer Football League (PFL) is another football-only league in FCS. It began in 1993 and exists entirely because of a 1991 NCAA rule change. Before then, some schools that were D-I for the majority of their sports were allowed to play football in D-II or III. Typically this route was chosen by smaller schools or schools whose athletic focus was outside of football (typically basketball). D-III was an especially attractive football option, since a school didn't need to spend money on football scholarships, but this immediately opened up the possibility of some Loophole Abuse: schools could recruit a player for football, then award him a scholarship in another sport. Dayton, a school with a deep basketball tradition, competed in D-III football and became a powerhouse at that level, making five D-III championship games from 1980-91 and winning two of them (1980, 1989). The 1987 D-III championship game paired two D-I schools playing in D-III, Dayton and Wagner (Wagner won 19-3). The perception that slumming big boys were dominating D-III football (and accusations about the scholarship issue mentioned above, which the schools denied was happening) angered the D-III schools, and they got the NCAA to require all D-I members to conduct all sports at their own level by 1993 (this is usually called "the Dayton rule"). Many schools forced up to D-I in 1993 wanted to keep running their program the same as they had in D-II or D-III, without additional scholarship expenses, so they banded together to form the league.^note One of the charter members, Drake, was returning to the I-AA level after moving to D-III in 1987. They'd been a I-A team until the NCAA forced them to reclassify in 1982. All Pioneer members are small private schools except Morehead State, a small public school that elected to de-emphasize football. We're not kidding about the "small" part. The largest school, St. Thomas, has barely over 10,000 total students, with only a little more than 6,000 being undergraduates; most have undergraduate enrollments less than 5,000, and the PFL is home to the smallest D-I school (including the non-football schools!) in Presbyterian, with barely over 850 undergraduates. As noted in the MVFC folder, the PFL operates out of the same St. Louis office complex that also hosts the MVFC and the non-football Missouri Valley Conference, though unlike the MVC it has no formal relationship with the MVFC.

The latest arrivals came in 2021, specifically the aforementioned Presbyterian and St. Thomas of Minnesota. Presbyterian effectively replaced Jacksonville (FL), which dropped football after 2019. While technically independent in 2020–21, the Blue Hose nonetheless played a full Pioneer League slate that spring; they weren't eligible for the league title but were eligible for individual awards. As for St. Thomas, the Twin Cities school was involuntarily kicked out of its D-III league for being too strong in multiple sports,^{More background} St. Thomas was a charter member of the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (MIAC), founded in 1920, but starting around 1990 the school sought to raise its profile, renaming itself to the University of St. Thomas (instead of College of St. Thomas), and expanding its academic offerings, fundraising and student recruitment. As a result, by the 2000s UST had over 6,000 undergrads enrolled, about two to three times as many as the other MIAC schools, and with more money and a larger student body to draw from, they began to dominate MIAC sports across the board. There was also a sense that UST was stepping on the toes of other MIAC schools academically as well, particularly when it opened a law school, which was a direct competitor to the longtime law school at their crosstown MIAC rival Hamline. In 2019 the MIAC informed UST that they were no longer welcome in the conference. and soon got an invite from the D-I non-football Summit League. With the Summit's backing, St. Thomas successfully obtained a waiver of an NCAA rule that would have effectively barred them from a direct move to D-I. The Tommies joined the Pioneer League for football, going through a five-year transition process instead of the four then used for moves from D-II, with both transition periods reduced by a year in 2025.^note At the time St. Thomas got its waiver, a D-III to D-I transition would have taken 12 years, but the NCAA had been preparing to vote on a proposal to shorten such a transition to five. The NCAA soon formalized the five-year time frame, later reducing it to four.

Current schools: Chattanooga, The Citadel, East Tennessee State, Furman, Mercer, Samford, Tennessee Tech, VMI^note Virginia Military Institute. The school is very insistent that it should never be called just "Virginia Military", but by either its initials or full name., Western Carolina, Wofford
Headquarters: Spartanburg, SC
Current commissioner: Michael Cross
Reigning champion: Mercer
Website: soconsports.com

Founded in 1921, the Southern Conference (or simply SoCon) is the fifth-oldest Division I conference and has had 44 full members over the course of its history. Two current FBS power conferences, the SEC and ACC, spun off from the sprawling SoCon earlier in its history. Despite the constant changes in membership, the conference remained at the major college level until 1982, when all of its schools were relegated to I-AA by the NCAA. For many years, it was at the very top of the FCS ladder, but conference realignment took a major toll, with Marshall bolting for I-A in 1997 after playing in five of the previous six I-AA championship games (winning twice), then three members leaving in 2014. Appalachian State and Georgia Southern, with nine FCS championships between them, left for FBS and the Sun Belt; Elon stayed in FCS but left for both sides of the CAA. At the same time, Mercer and VMI (the latter a former member) joined for all sports including football, while East Tennessee State (also a former member) rejoined for non-football sports. ETSU resurrected its dormant football program in 2015, playing that season as an FCS independent before joining SoCon football in 2016. Of note, Appalachian State made history in 2007 when they upset a #5-ranked Michigan and became the first non-transitional^note Cincinnati beat Penn State in 1983 but was only in I-AA for that year, having been dropped from I-A against its wishes; the Bearcats (and several other teams, mainly in the Mid-American Conference) returned to I-A the next year FCS team to defeat a ranked FBS team. The full (and football) membership then stabilized, with no change from 2014 until the announcement that Tennessee Tech would join in 2026.

The conference is notable for containing the only full-fledged state-supported four-year Military Academy, VMI, and the only other state-supported four-year school with a majority of its students belonging to a cadet corps, The Citadel.^{More background} The Citadel and VMI are two of the six federally recognized "senior military colleges", with a cadet corps that can have members commissioned directly into the military—but whose graduates are not required to take military commissions. The others are Texas A&M and Virginia Tech on the FBS side, D-III Norwich (the only private military college) and D-II North Georgia, which doesn't play football. The two play the annual Military Classic of the South rivalry game. The SoCon has only one non-football member, UNC Greensboro.

Current schools: East Texas A&M^*Formerly called Texas A&M–Commerce from 1996-2024, and East Texas State before that. It changed its name partly as a throwback to the earlier name, and partly because people outside of Texas were confused by the "Commerce" part of Texas A&M–Commerce, thinking it meant that it was a college focused on finance and business, when it was actually referring to its location in the town of Commerce, an hour's drive northeast of Dallas, Houston Christian^*formerly Houston Baptist, changed its name in 2022, Incarnate Word, Lamar, McNeese^*its formal name includes "State", but it no longer uses that word in its athletic branding, Nicholls^*ditto, Northwestern State, Southeastern Louisiana. Stephen F. Austin,^*Also includes "State" in its formal name but not its athletic branding UTRGV^*Texas–Rio Grande Valley
Headquarters: Frisco, TX
Current commissioner: Chris Grant
Past commissioner of note: Greg Sankey
Reigning champion: Stephen F. Austin
Website: southland.org

Founded in 1963, the Southland Conference (or SLC) was a strong lower level conference in its early years (then-league member Louisiana Tech won the initial NCAA D-II championship in 1973), before moving to the major college level in 1975. The Independence Bowl began in 1976 as a postseason home for the Southland's champion. In 1982, the league moved to I-AA after most of its members failed to meet the requirements for I-A membership (McNeese did meet the requirements but voluntarily reclassified with the rest of the conference). Long considered one of the top FCS leagues, five schools left following the spring 2021 season. One of the departing schools, Sam Houston, won the FCS title on its way out. Another one of the departing schools, Lamar, decided that its destination of the WAC wasn't as good of a fit as it thought; it originally planned to return to the SLC in 2023, but wound up returning for 2022. More recently, UTRGV, which had announced that it would add football in 2025 (after a practice season in 2024) as a member of the United Athletic Conference (see below), changed its plans, joining the SLC as a full member in 2024 with football following the next year. Also in 2024, Stephen F. Austin, another school that left in 2021, returned to the SLC.

As of the 2026 season, the SLC has two full non-football members in LSU New Orleans^note Returned to the LSU system in 2026 after 15 years, also adopting a variant of its original name of "Louisiana State University in New Orleans". It had been the "University of New Orleans" for more than 50 years. and Texas A&M–Corpus Christi. It added D-II upgrader East Texas A&M (called Texas A&M–Commerce at the time) in 2022, and its football future was further secured when Incarnate Word, which had announced a move to the Western Athletic Conference and its newly reestablished football league, backed out of that move and stayed in the SLC. As noted above, the SLC and OVC entered into a scheduling partnership, though it didn't keep the OVC from announcing its plans to merge its football league with that of the Big South. The SLC had announced plans to adopt a new name in the near future, but took a half-step away from them, unveiling a new logo in 2023 but keeping its name.

Current schools: Alabama A&M, Alabama State, Alcorn State, Arkansas–Pine Bluff, Bethune–Cookman, Florida A&M, Grambling State, Jackson State, Mississippi Valley State, Prairie View A&M, Southern, Texas Southern
Headquarters: Birmingham, AL
Current commissioner: Charles McClelland
Reigning champion: Prairie View A&M
Website: swac.org

The oldest FCS conference, the Southwestern Athletic Conference (or SWAC) was founded in 1920. Like the MEAC, it consists entirely of HBCUs, and most of the HBCUs that casual fans are aware of (Grambling, Jackson State, Alcorn State, Prairie View) are in this conference. It was the first HBCU conference to play at the major college level, when it upgraded as a group in 1977, the year before D-I was split into I-A and I-AA (and they went I-AA). It's used an East–West divisional setup since 1999, with the divisional winners playing in a championship game. It has a longer-standing policy of not sending its champion to the FCS playoffs than its HBCU sister conference, effectively giving it up in The '90s, though, as with the MEAC, a non-champion is still eligible for an at-large bid (and Florida A&M received one in 2021). There are three reasons why the SWAC rejects an automatic bid: three conference schools have tradition-steeped (and lucrative) rivalry games on Thanksgiving weekend that conflict with the first round of the playoffs^* Alabama State has its Turkey Day Classic on Thanksgiving Day—traditionally against D-II Tuskegee—while Grambling and Southern play each other in the Bayou Classic in New Orleans on Saturday; the SWAC championship game and the Celebration Bowl are big moneymakers; and the SWAC is winless in 20 playoff games (Florida A&M's playoff wins predate their conference membership). The SWAC is the home of the first college football HC to win 400 games (Grambling's Eddie Robinson) and the longest losing streak in the sport's history (Prairie View A&M's 80-game skid from 1989-98). After the 2025 season, Southern followed the lead of several MEAC programs in hiring an NFL great as head coach, hiring Marshall Faulk.

As noted above, Bethune–Cookman and Florida A&M joined in July 2021. Both were placed in the East Division, with Alcorn State switching to the West.^*Depending on your sense of geography, either the Mississippi River or the Louisiana–Mississippi border is the de facto dividing line. One or two schools are on the "wrong" side of the aforementioned lines, but not by much. Alcorn, the westernmost of the Mississippi schools, is on the wrong side of both lines, but is less than 5 miles from the river. Southern is west of the state line; while it's on the wrong side of the river, its campus is on the river in Baton Rouge. Florida A&M is the only HBCU to win an FCS national championship (the initial 1978 I-AA title), and also scored probably the biggest shining moment for an HBCU team ever on the national stage with a 16–13 upset of Miami in 1979 (with future baseball star Vince Coleman kicking the winning FG for the Rattlers).

Current schools: Abilene Christian, Austin Peay, Central Arkansas, Eastern Kentucky, North Alabama, Tarleton State,^*Sometimes listed as just Tarleton; the official university branding guidelines say to use "Tarleton State University" on first reference and Tarleton afterwards (and never TSU, presumably to avoid confusion with Texas State and Texas Southern), but their own athletics website freely uses both Tarleton State and Tarleton West Florida (football only), West Georgia^note Little Rock joined in 2026, but doesn't have a football team. Neither does UT Arlington, which remained a full conference member through the 2026 WAC-to-UAC transition (see below).
Headquarters: Jacksonville, FL
Current commissioner: Jeff Bacon^note Titled as "Chief Executive Officer" of Unisun Sports (see below).
Past commissioner of note: Oliver Luck^note The founding commissioner of the UAC's football league; titled as "Executive Director".
Reigning champions: Abilene Christian (automatic bid), Tarleton State – co-champions
Website: uacsports.com

The United Athletic Conference both is and is not the newest FCS conference—its Facebook status would be "It's Complicated". The UAC name dates to 2020; it was originally planned as the name of a new all-sports conference that would have been formed after the Atlantic Sun Conference (then officially the ASUN Conference) merged with the Coastal Collegiate Sports Association. However, that merger never went through; see The Other Wiki for more details. By contrast, the UAC lineage dates to the 1962 founding of the Western Athletic Conference (WAC). The slow-motion process that led to the UAC's July 2026 transition from a football-only league to an all-sports conference started in December 2022 by the announcement that the 'ASUN and WAC would merge their football leagues. The league used the placeholder name of "ASUN–WAC Football Conference" before reviving the UAC name in April 2023. The ASUN initially contributed Austin Peay, Central Arkansas, Eastern Kentucky, and North Alabama, with the WAC contributing schools from Texas and Utah, namely Abilene Christian, Southern Utah, Stephen F. Austin, Tarleton State, and Utah Tech. Due to scheduling commitments, the UAC played only a 6-game schedule in 2023. It was set to move to a full round-robin in 2024, but that was before D-II upgrader West Georgia was announced as joining in that season.^note A 9-game conference schedule is viable for FBS programs, which have 12-game regular seasons, but before 2026 FCS programs were limited to 11 games in most seasons. It would have added another member when UTRGV (a WAC member through 2023–24) added football in 2025, but that school left for the Southland Conference in 2024. Soon after, Stephen F. Austin decided to return to its former home of the SLC on the same schedule. While media reports indicated that the new football conference planned to move en masse to FBS in the near future, neither conference mentioned an FBS move, and FBS talk soon died down.

The ASUN was founded as the Trans America Athletic Conference in 1978, changed its name to the Atlantic Sun Conference in 2001, adopted the ASUN branding in 2016, and went back to "Atlantic Sun" in 2023 (though it still uses "ASUN" as its abbreviation). Regardless of brand name, the conference did not begin football competition until 2022. For a few years, the ASUN had a football alliance with the Big South, but replaced it in 2021 with an alliance with the WAC that eventually became the UAC.

As of the 2025 season, seven ASUN members weren't in the UAC. Florida Gulf Coast, Jacksonville, Lipscomb, North Florida, and D-II upgrader Queens^note Formally Queens University of Charlotte; not to be confused with Queens College in the NYC borough of that name, which stayed in D-II. don't play football at all. Stetson plays non-scholarship football in the Pioneer League. Bellarmine added football in 2022 but plays sprint football, a variant played under standard college rules but with an upper limit of 178 lb (81 kg) for player weight. West Georgia, which joined the ASUN in 2024, sponsors (full-sized) football and thus joined the UAC, reuniting with its former D-II Gulf South Conference mates Central Arkansas and North Alabama.

As for the WAC, it started in 1962 with six schools in the intermountain West and over time expanded and flourished as a major conference until a poorly-received expansion from 10 to 16 members in 1996 kicked off three decades of turmoil. Eight schools left in 1999 to form the Mountain West Conference, and further instability eventually saw the WAC lose all but two of its football schools during the early-2010s realignment cycle, leading the FBS conference to drop football after the 2012 season, then reinstate it in the FCS level in 2021 after the 2020 arrivals of Tarleton State and Utah Tech (then Dixie State), both D-II upgraders with football. Five FCS schools joined the league as all-sports members in 2022 (four Southland members out of Texas and one from the Big Sky), at which time WAC football returned. When the Southland responded by kicking out its departing members (the so-called "Texas Four"), the WAC in turn pushed the arrival of those schools, as well as the return of football, forward to 2021. They solved the numbers problem for playoff qualification by bringing incoming ASUN members Central Arkansas, Eastern Kentucky, and Jacksonville State in as football members, originally intended for that season only, in what was officially called the "ASUN–WAC (or WAC–ASUN) Challenge". However, they only got their automatic bid after successfully lobbying the NCAA for a rules change that accommodated the new alliance. With Sam Houston starting an FBS transition in 2022 ahead of its 2023 departure for CUSA, dropping the WAC to 5 playoff-eligible schools, the WAC and ASUN renewed that alliance for 2022. The WAC's playoff-eligible lineup dropped to 4 when Incarnate Word, which had planned to join from the SLC, backed out of that move and stayed put, and then to 3 when Lamar pushed its planned 2023 return to the SLC forward a year. All this led the ASUN and WAC to formally merge their football leagues.

Before the 2026 transition from the WAC to the UAC, the WAC had two non-football members in California Baptist and Utah Valley (the largest D-I school without football, with over 40,000 residential undergrads), but was in the midst of a huge membership upheaval among its non-football schools. Grand Canyon became a full but non-football member of the Mountain West Conference in 2025 (after backing out of a planned move to the West Coast Conference); Seattle left to rejoin the WCC in 2025; and Cal Baptist and Utah Valley joined the Big West Conference in 2026 (as, respectively, the conference's only private school and only non-California member). While Chicago State left the WAC in 2022, the conference welcomed two schools at that time. Southern Utah was a full member with football, while UT Arlington (which had been in the WAC for one year in the 2010s) returned as a non-football member. As noted above, UTRGV left for the Southland Conference in 2024.

On June 26, 2025 (the day after Southern Utah and Utah Tech announced their move to the Big Sky), the ASUN and WAC announced starting in 2026, they would become partners in an all-sports consortium eventually branded as Unisun Sports. At that time, the WAC rebranded as the UAC, which expanded its scope from football to all-sports. The core membership of the new UAC features all of the remaining UAC football members and two non-football schools — legacy WAC member UT Arlington and new arrival Little Rock (joining from the OVC). West Florida joined the UAC for football only in 2026, reuniting it with three former Gulf South Conference mates, and otherwise plays in the ASUN. The initial lineup of the reconfigured ASUN consists of the aforementioned seven legacy ASUN members that do not have scholarship FCS programs, plus West Florida.

The UAC boasts another oddly-colored football field in that of Central Arkansas, with purple and gray sections alternating every 5 yards. With its move to FCS, Tarleton State has now competed at every level of college football except FBS.^{more detail}They began in the juco ranks as a member of the NJCAA's Southwest Junior College Football Conference, became a four-year school in 1959, moved to the NAIA in 1961 and played at both NAIA levels when it had two divisions, as a member of the Lone Star Conference (Division I) from 1970-75, then the Texas Intercollegiate Athletic Association (Division II) from 1976-93. The TIAA was also an NCAA D-III conference for one season in 1977. Then Tarleton rejoined the Lone Star, now an NCAA D-II conference, in 1995, staying until 2019, after which it made its FCS move.

Chicago Maroons

The University of Chicago is easily the most successful football program to no longer play at the Division I level. A founding member of the Big Ten Conference in 1896 under legendary head coach Amos Alonzo Stagg (who coached there for 41 years), they were considered the first "western" school to be capable of competing with the elites of the Ivy League around the turn of the 20th century. They had the first All-American to come from a non-Ivy League school (Clarence Herschberger), won national titles in 1905 and 1913, and had the first ever Heisman Trophy winner (Jay Berwanger) in 1935. They also hold the distinction of being the first team to have an indoor home venue, playing games inside an equestrian arena (with a bark playing surface) in 1893 and 1894, and then hosting Michigan inside Chicago Coliseum in 1896, the first football game played indoors on a regulation-sized field.

The end of the line for Chicago as a football power came when Robert Maynard Hutchins became the university's president in 1929. Hutchins believed that universities should be squarely focused on classical education, and had disdain for things he regarded as distractions to pure academics, like vocational majors, activities, fraternities and sororities, and especially athletics. Hutchins forced Stagg to retire against his will, then squeezed the football program by eliminating athletic scholarships, refusing to establish a physical education major, and forcing the team to forego spring practices by changing the academic calendar. After years of struggle under this de-emphasis of athletics, the school finally dropped its football team entirely following the 1939 season, clearing the way for their now-vacant stadium to be used as the site for the world's first ever artificial nuclear reactor. Chicago was the most successful defunct program in NCAA football history... for about 22 years. In 1963, the university brought football back first as a club sport, then as a D-III program. They've never come close to their heights of the early 20th century, but did have a run of success in the University Athletic Association conference in the '90s-'00s including five conference titles.

Carlise Indian School

The United States Indian Industrial School, often shortened to its hometown of "Carlisle Indian School", was one of many Native American "boarding schools" established in the country around that time for the purpose of assimilating natives into American society. Based out of the then-decommissioned Carlisle Barracks, the Carlisle Indians football program established in 1893 and quickly became one of the top football programs in the country, regularly competing with (and often defeating) the elites of the Ivy Leagues as well as the US Military Academy (now the Army Black Knights, who Carlisle famously routed in 1912 with Dwight D. Eisenhower on the field).

They found some initial success, but they didn't reach true dominance until the arrival of innovative head coach Glen "Pop" Warner in 1899. Led by six future hall of famers including all-world athlete Jim Thorpe^note The sheer breadth of his accomplishments is well-covered on the NFL Names to Know page, but at minimum Olympic Gold Medalist and charter member of both the College and Pro Football Halls of Fame are worth noting here., Carlisle was labeled "the most dynamic" football team of the early 20th century, inventing and popularizing a number of "trick" plays that have since become mainstream (the fake handoff, the "hidden ball" play on kick returns, etc.) while relying more on speed and quickness than most other elite programs which prized power and physicality.

They were also known for their willingness to travel to distant away games, much more so than the other "powerhouse" schools of the northeast in that era. They traveled as far south as Georgia, west as San Francisco, and even played in Canada (1912 against a team of Canadian all-stars, trouncing them 49-7). They played another "Indian School" (Haskell from Lawrence, KS^note which still exists as Haskell Indian Nations University, which is a member of the NAIA for athletics, and revived its football team from 1990 to 2015) in 1904 in St. Louis following that year's Summer Olympics during the St. Louis World's Fair. Their 1906 trip to Vanderbilt, where they lost 4-0, is often seen as putting southern football on the map. Meanwhile, their upset of heavily favored Harvard in 1911 is considered among the biggest upsets in the sport's history.^note This cost Harvard a national championship, breaking up what would have been a four-in-a-row streak from 1910-13.

Unfortunately, the Native Americans at the school faced unpleasant and outright racist conditions. Their native languages, customs, and dress were banned while they were forced into "militaristic regimentation" and there were accounts of native women being forced to marry white men. A 1914 congressional investigation addressed the conditions and found that athletics played an outsized role at the school, leading to the dismissal of Pop Warner (ironically one of the biggest advocates of the students at the school). When the US entered World War I in 1917, the Carlisle Barracks were reestablished by the Federal War Department and the school permanently closed.

Still, the school's football legacy lives on. Their overall winning percentage of .646 is the best by any defunct program in college football history (and for comparison, would rank 13th among current FBS programs). They likewise have the most All-Americans (17) and Hall of Famers (6) of any defunct team.

Pacific Tigers

The oldest institution of higher learning in California,^note The oldest by date of charter, but not start of instruction. Santa Clara University (currently D-I non-football) opened for classes in 1851, a year before UOP did so. but didn't receive its charter until 1855. the University of the Pacific competed in varsity football for exactly a century, from 1895 to 1995, when they decided to drop the sport. With UAB reinstating its team in 2017 after two years away from the sport, UOP is now the most recent I-A/FBS football program to go defunct. With just 4,000 students in 1995, UOP was already one of the smallest I-A schools, and the program had fallen on hard times by that point, having only secured two winning seasons in the previous 20 (and both of those were meager 6–5 campaigns), as well as amassing several hundred thousand dollars in debt, forcing them to play big-time opponents in paycheck games that often turned into Curb-Stomp Battle situations.^exampleslosses of 63–14 to Arkansas (1988), 55–0 to Auburn (1989), 55–7 to Tennessee (1990), 86–24 to California (1991), 55–7 to Texas Tech (1993), 70–21 to Nebraska (1994). Big West Conference mates Long Beach State and Cal State Fullerton dropping football earlier in The '90s also helped reduce the feasibility of continuing with football at UOP, and the school's Board of Regents finally decided to end things after finishing 3–8 in '95.

But despite that and a mediocre overall record, Pacific had quite a legacy in football, mostly centered on its decision to step up and offer Amos Alonzo Stagg its HC position after his forced retirement at Chicago. The 70-year-old Stagg liked the idea of winding down his career in sunny California, and coached the Tigers from 1933–46. While he had a losing overall record there (60–77–7), he won five conference titles and had two standout years: a 7–3 mark in 1938, which included a win at Chicago, and going 7–2 in 1943, including road wins at Cal and UCLA. Stagg's presence as a coach gave the Tigers some national media attention and they achieved a few AP poll rankings during that time. Their best year came in 1949 under Stagg's replacement Larry Siemering, when All-American QB Eddie LeBaron led them to an undefeated season. They were up-and-down as a team after that, but the program developed a strong football culture and became a "cradle of coaches", with three Super Bowl-winning coaches having ties to the program: Tom Flores played there, Pete Carroll was a player and assistant, and Jon Gruden had a one-year assistant stint early in his career. Chargers owner Alex Spanos was an alum, and various former Tigers went onto major college (Wayne Hardin, Walt Harris, Ron Turner) and NFL (Bruce Coslet, John Fassel, Hue Jackson) HC jobs.

Beyond football, UOP's strongest sports are women's volleyball (back-to-back national titles in 1985-86) and men's basketball (9 NCAA tournament appearances). The University of the Pacific in California is not to be confused with Pacific University in Oregon, a D-III school that does play football. The two schools are sometimes mixed up, since people wrongly guess that the D-I Pacific's full name is Pacific University.

Wichita State Shockers

Wichita State University is the third-largest four-year university in Kansas, located in the state's largest city, and is generally viewed as solid comprehensive public university. Pizza Hut was founded by WSU students (and brothers) Dan and Frank Carney in Wichita in 1958, and the restaurant's original building was moved to campus and turned into a museum. The school has a notable sports heritage, anchored by baseball, which won the (Men's) College World Series in 1989 and finished as a runner-up three times, and men's basketball, which has made two NCAA Final Four appearances (1965, 2013) and won the NIT in 2011, as well as being the alma mater of NBA All-Star Xavier McDaniel. This heritage also included football, but the program was a perennial underachiever, and the school dropped the sport after 1986. Even so, the program can boast of several important footnotes in college football history.

Originally playing its home games on a stubbled wheatfield close to campus, which partly explains the school's sports nickname "Shockers" (short for "wheatshockers", which also got applied because many of the early students earned money by working in wheatfields), they hosted two historically important games in 1905. The October 6 game against Cooper College (now NAIA member Sterling College) was one of the first outdoor night games played west of the Mississippi,^note Sometimes misreported as the first, but Iowa schools Drake and Grinnell played night games against each other in 1900 and 1901. The first night game happened in 1892 in Pennsylvania, between Mansfield and the now defunct Wyoming Seminary. using gas lamps provided by the Coleman lantern company, with Fairmount (as they were called at the time) winning 24-0. Then a Christmas Day game against Washburn (now NCAA D-II) used an experimental set of rules that marked the debut of the forward pass and the ten-yard requirement for first downs in the sport (the game ended in scoreless tie).

A small college power on the Great Plains during the 1930s, WSU jumped up to the major college level by joining the Missouri Valley Conference after World War II and won five conference titles between 1954 and 1963, a period that also saw a linebacker named Bill Parcells play for the Shockers. After that they slipped into mediocrity. A 1969 stadium expansion gave them some hope for the future. It also saw WSU become a pioneer in having a corporately sponsored stadium name: their home became Cessna Stadium after Cessna Aircraft helped pay for the expansion. But tragedy struck in 1970 when a plane carrying the team to Utah State crashed, killing 31 of the 40 passengers, including 14 Shocker players and HC Ben Wilson. The team would regroup and finish the season (ending it winless), while college football endured an even more tragic plane crash six weeks later that saw Marshall's entire travel squad lose their lives. Shocker football never really recovered from this incident, though it made another historic headline in 1980 by hiring Willie Jeffries, the first Black head coach at the I-A level. In 1982, Jeffries led them to an 8-3 record and an upset of instate rival Kansas, but the next year he was let go amid an NCAA investigation into rules violations that led to the team getting placed on probation. In the middle of all this, the Missouri Valley Conference saw most of its members demoted to I-AA for not meeting attendance requirements, and the league stopped sponsoring football after 1985. After playing as an independent the next year, the university decided the football program wasn't cost-effective and discontinued it, even though during the period they played as a major college team (1945-86), they had a better overall record than their other instate rival Kansas State. In fact, K-State's remarkable football rise happening after WSU dropped the sport probably isn't a coincidence, since the Wildcats no longer had another team down the road to compete with for recruits.

There were periodic studies done in the decades after about reviving football, but no plans were ever made for it, leaving WSU in the unique situation of being a member of an FBS conference (American) that doesn't play football.^note It was the only such school until Grand Canyon, which has never had a football team, joined the MW in 2025. The next year saw Pac-12 2.0 welcome Gonzaga, which last played football in 1941. Oddly, Wichita State football lives on in the fictional universe of Ted Lasso, which had the initial premise that Lasso led the Shockers to a D-II national championship,^note Because of NCAA rules, WSU would actually have to be FCS if they were still playing and didn't want to compete on the FBS level. and went viral due to video of his locker room celebration dance after the game, leading to an unlikely gig coaching a British soccer club.