Merrimack and Sacred Heart have announced the return of the Yankee Conference Championship for the 2024 season. Both teams are FCS Independents in 2024 following their moves to the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference (MAAC). Neither program has previously been a member of the Yankee Conference or its successor, the Atlantic 10 Conference.
The game is mostly symbolic as the winner will not receive an automatic bid to the FCS Playoffs nor does it bring the conference back as it was in 1996. As noted by Matt Brown in his Extra Points article, the sponsor of the game – LEONA – purchased the trademarks and intellectual property of the Yankee Conference and wanted to keep the Yankee Conference name alive. Brown also noted that there is no plan to bring the Yankee Conference back as a formal NCAA conference.
The Yankee Conference started as a multi-sport conference in 1947 but it later became a football-only conference in the mid-1970s. The conference became part of the I-AA subdivision following the Division I split in 1978. The Yankee Conference competed through the 1996 season but merged with the Atlantic 10 starting in 1997. The 12 teams previously in the Yankee Conference for football moved to the Atlantic 10 – Boston University, Connecticut, Delaware, James Madison, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Northeastern, Rhode Island, Richmond, Villanova, and William & Mary.
The Atlantic 10 kept football for a decade until the Colonial Athletic Association (now the Coastal Athletic Association) began to poach A10 members, which led to the A10 dropping football after the 2006 season. Like the Yankee Conference before it, all 12 football-playing A10 members joined the CAA in 2007, however, the CAA established a separate entity for football and thus did not retain the Atlantic 10/Yankee Conference history.
William & Mary is the most recent Yankee Conference football champion but that will change when Sacred Heart visits Merrimack on November 16 in North Andover, Massachusetts.
Photo Credit to Sacred Heart University Athletics
