On Friday, April 18, the NESCAC presidents approved a proposal to allow NESCAC football teams to participate in the NCAA Division III Championship, beginning in Fall 2026.
The decision came on the heels of several months of campaigning, spearheaded by the NESCAC Football Players Association (NESCACFBPA). The NESCACFBPA was created at the start of 2025 by Vaughn Seelicke, a kicker/punter from Tufts who served as the board’s president. Seelicke subsequently recruited board members from each NESCAC football team, including wide receiver Jack Lucido ’26 as the representative from Wesleyan.
The NESCACFBPA then created a formal plan, through which they sought support for their cause.
“We started with sending out forms to all the respective teams, and getting all the players involved, and making sure that support from the players was there,” Lucido said. “And then do the same thing with the coaches. They unanimously wanted to go to the playoffs, so that was easy. But then after that, [Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC)] integration was huge. So getting all the NESCAC SAACs on board was really big. And once we were able to do that, we could formalize it and send it up the chain to the [athletic director] and the president saying everyone’s on board to get football into the playoffs.”
The NESCAC, which was founded in 1971, generally did not allow its schools to send their teams to compete in the NCAA Championships. In 1993, this rule was changed for all sports except football. Though barred from postseason play, NESCAC teams did play games against non-conference opponents until the start of the 1992 season. From then on, NESCAC teams began to exclusively play one another, a practice which continues to the present day.
Though there was discontent among teams about football’s barring from postseason play, a genuine movement to change the rule only gained traction last year. On December 18, the Ivy League announced they were allowing their football teams to participate in the Division I Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) playoffs for the first time since the conference’s formation in 1954. Teams could participate beginning with the 2025 season.
“[Being barred from playoffs was] definitely something we talked about a lot,” Lucido said. “I wouldn’t say it was something that we were trying to change, because we just assumed that not having playoffs was the norm. But once the Ivy League became eligible to go to the playoffs, I think that was really the big push for us and why we wanted to go to the playoffs.”
Though they received broad support from players and coaches, there was some initial pushback of the feasibility of the schedule changes, which the NESCACFBPA successfully countered.
“I think the biggest argument was that it would interfere with our academics and the finals schedule, and our whole argument to that was that all the other sports, they’re eligible to go to the playoffs and that may be happening during final schedules,” Lucido said. “[There are] a lot of teams who went really far in the NCAA Tournament and did really well and still maintain very good academic standing.”
Despite the Ivy League serving as inspiration for the NESCAC’s decision, the NESCAC will not be following that rollout schedule. In 2025, the NESCAC will not participate in postseason play, and will follow their standard nine-game schedule. Beginning in 2026, the nine-game regular season schedule will remain; however, whichever team finishes at the top of the standings (making them the conference champion) will earn an automatic bid to the NCAA Division III Football Championship. NESCAC teams will be eligible for selection via Pool C at-large bids.
This raises questions about how NESCAC teams can qualify for at-large bids. These bids are normally determined by looking at a team’s record in the context of the difficulty of their opponents. However, since NESCAC football teams have not played any non-conference teams in over 30 years, it’s difficult to discern how exactly they will stack up against the unfamiliar competition.
“That’s definitely a big challenge [and] also some of the pushback we got,” Lucido said. “There are people saying we wouldn’t be able to compete in the playoffs just because we’re smaller schools and we don’t play out-of-conference teams. But there’s a lot of comparisons to high academic schools like [Johns] Hopkins and [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] who have done really well in the tournament. So that was a big argument for us.”
There is also the possibility that the NESCAC could eventually introduce non-conference games into their regular seasons, which would help provide a better sense of how well they stack up against less familiar competition.
But for now, Lucido and the NESCACFBPA are excited to take this next step in the conference’s development with the support of administration and conference leadership.
“I am pleased to share this information with our football student athletes, coaches, and administrators,” said NESCAC Executive Director Andrea Savage. “The conference has had positive experiences participating in postseason play, and we are pleased that football teams will have the opportunity to participate in the NCAA Championships and share in this experience as well.”
Erin Byerly can be reached at ebyerly@wesleyan.edu.
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