Good morning, and thanks for your continued support of Extra Points.
If you’re a college football fan of a certain age in the New England or Mid-Atlantic area, you probably remember the Yankee Conference. From the mid 1970s to the 1990s, the Yankee was a football-only league, featuring schools like UConn, Maine, Rhode Island, William & Mary and Northeastern. The conference regularly pumped out top 20 teams and sent multiple teams to the playoffs in the 1990s.
But the league merged with the Atlantic 10 in the fall of 1996 and adopted that league’s branding. Today, a few of those old Yankee Conference teams, like Boston University and Vermont, don’t play football at all. The rest are scattered between the FBS, CAA and Patriot League.
College football in New England certainly isn’t dead, but the Yankee Conference was.
Until now.
Earlier today, Sacred Heart and Merrimack, two FCS squads who compete as independents, announced they will play for the Yankee Conference Championship on November 16th. The matchup is presented by LEONA, a college sports consulting company who was instrumental in bringing back the league’s old IP.
But before the realignment Subreddits and message boards explode, I should remind everybody that bringing a conference back doesn’t mean the conference is back.
