Meet the DIII football players organizing...to play more college football

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Back in December, the Ivy League made a major announcement. After decades of declining to participate, conference members will now be permitted to participate in the FCS Playoffs. The catalyst for finally making the change came from a proposal from the Ivy League Student Athlete Advisory Committee, not from coaches or broadcast networks.

Now that the Ivy is onboard, members from every major FCS conference can participate in the football playoffs, if they so choose. But in D-III, that’s not the case.

The New England Small College Athletic Conference, or NESCAC, is a lot like the Ivy League. Like the Ivies, the NESCAC is full of private colleges in the Northeast that are known for elite academics. Like the Ivies, the NESCAC also strives to avoid the financial and structural excesses of college athletics. And like the Ivy League, the NESCAC champion does not participate in the D-III football playoffs.

One group is trying to change that. The NESCAC Football Player’s Association. Or NESCACFBPA, if you will.

Other Player Association-type groups in college athletics have typically been centered around agitating for athlete input in financial matters, health care or work conditions. Tufts kicker Vaughn Seelicke, the founder of the NESCACFBPA, told me that he could see a world where the organization fought for other changes in the world of D-III college football, for now, the organization is laser-focused on one thing.

“Right now, our entire goal is getting to the playoffs.”

Seelicke is a slightly unlikely leader of a New England college football player revolt. For one, unlike most of his teammates, he’s from Arkansas, not the Northeast. He’s a kicker, not a quarterback. And while his Tufts Jumbos have been near the top of the league over the last several seasons, they haven’t won the conference recently. In recent years, Trinity, Middlebury, and Wesleyan have been the squads that would most likely be earning any hypothetical playoff bid.

But Seelicke doesn’t see his efforts as born out of pure self-interest. “I think there’s too much talent in this league for our champion to not go to the playoffs” he told me, pointing to recent NESCAC players who have transferred to schools like Wake Forest, Furman and UC Davis.

After securing support from his own teammates, Seelicke and his NESCACFBPA peers sought to gather support from every other team in the league. They reached out to SAAC members at other institutions, mined their own personal contacts (many Tufts players, Seelicke told me, are from the area and played against athletes at schools like Williams and Amherst), and even reached out to coaches for recommendations on who to reach out to at other schools…something you typically don’t hear about with player association organizing efforts.

But perhaps unlike anybody seeking to earn employment classification or broadcast revenue sharing, Seelicke told me conference coaches are overwhelmingly supportive of their movement. After all, they want to compete in the playoffs too.

Why doesn’t the NESCAC permit this again?

Like the Ivy League’s hesitancy to play in the FCS Playoffs, Seelicke told me the concerns are centered around academics, and not wanting athletes to miss additional class time.

Seelicke doesn’t find any of those arguments to be particularly convincing. After all, plenty of other D-III schools with elite academics, like Johns Hopkins, Case Western Reserve and Carnegie Mellon, aren’t just eligible for the playoffs, but regularly qualify and win games.

Plus, other NESCAC athletic teams compete for postseason events, even if they require substantial travel. “Our lacrosse team won a national championship. Our field hockey team went to the national championship…. I live with a number of baseball and lacrosse players, and they play midweek games and miss class.”

The organization’s goal at the moment is to advance a proposal to get on the league’s agenda in April. Now that the Ivy League is on board with the football postseason, Seelicke is hopeful.

“The NESCAC aligns itself with excellence. They want to be the best in everything they do, and bring in people who want the same. And when I came here, along with all the members at our other schools, we came here to be the best at everything we could. We want to get the best grades, end up with the best jobs, everything.”

“I think the opportunity to be the best that we can be, on and off the field, is what this change would allow.”

It’s a little difficult to project how well the NESCAC champion would actually do in the playoffs. Since NESCAC schools don’t play any out of conference games, many D-III media outlets or advanced stats services don’t rank NESCAC teams, due to not having enough data. But to Seelicke and others, that isn’t the point.

The point is about wanting a chance.

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