Small New England schools of NESCAC say if Ivy League can compete in football playoffs, so can they
BOSTON (AP) — Since arriving at Tufts, junior Vaughn Seelicke has seen the Jumbos win Division III national championships in men’s lacrosse and women’s rowing. The men’s soccer team at the elite academic school just north of Boston has qualified for each of the last 10 NCAA tournaments, and won the title four times.
Seelicke and his fellow football players have never had the chance.
As a member of the New England Small College Athletic Conference, the Jumbos can’t compete in the Division III football playoffs — the only varsity teams on campus that can’t play for a national championship. After watching the Ivy League end its century-old postseason football ban, a group of NESCAC players are hoping to follow its lead.
“What brings a lot of the athletes to NESCAC is the ability to compete in an elite conference for sports, and obviously the academic side,” Seelicke said in an interview this week as the players prepared to make their case to the conference. “I want to compete at the highest level — athletically and academically. Changing this rule would allow that.”
An 11-school consortium that is pretty much what its name says — small New England colleges, plus Hamilton in upstate New York — NESCAC boasts some of the top academic institutions in the country. (Williams and Amherst are Nos. 1 and 2 on the U.S. News and World Report small liberal arts colleges rankings.)
So when they say they don’t want football to interfere with their students’ schoolwork, they actually mean it. While money-making FBS football factories in places like Ohio State and Alabama have seasons that stretch through final exams, NESCAC’s ban on postseason play had its players off the field just after midterms, in early November.
Things changed when the Ivy League announced in December that it would allow teams to compete in the FCS playoffs starting in 2025.
“The Ivy League and the NESCAC, especially for football — the rules have always been the same,” said Seelicke, a placekicker from Little Rock, Arkansas. “This has been something that’s been talked about in NESCAC for a long time. But with the Ivy League changing their rules, there’s been a groundswell of support in the NESCAC.”
And, he said, if the Ivies can manage it, so can Tufts.
“Look at all the other schools that are doing it,” Seelicke said, noting that Johns Hopkins (the No. 6 university in the academic rankings) went to the semifinals of the recent football playoffs. “If there was really an academic drop-off, they wouldn’t be doing it.”
Seelicke is Tufts’ representative on the NESCAC Football Players Association, a collection of at least one player from each of the conference’s 10 football-playing schools (Connecticut College doesn’t have a team) that has campaigned to end the postseason ban. It circulated an online petition that has gathered 3,200 signatures; the next step is to submit a proposal to their athletic directors, with the goal of getting it on the agenda for the conference meeting in April.
Seelicke said Tufts athletic director John Morris had agreed to advance the proposal; Morris did not respond to an email from The Associated Press seeking comment. A NESCAC spokeswoman also did not respond to request for comment.
The petition argues that the schools would benefit from the added exposure of competing in a national playoff tournament. The NCAA reimburses the programs for the expenses of attending; “no financial burden would be passed on to the universities,” the petitioners write.
But the players say their No. 1 issue is fairness: Every other team on campus can participate in its playoffs and compete for a championship except football. Ivy League football coaches made the same argument for years before their conference dropped its 100-year-old postseason ban in December.
“The issue is equity, being the only sport that doesn’t do it,” Seelicke said.
The NESCAC push comes as college athletes nationwide increasingly wrest power from the schools, whether it’s high-profile football players reaping millions in newly legal endorsement earnings or an attempt by the Dartmouth men’s basketball team to unionize.
And, Seelicke said, the players are merely applying what they’ve learned in the classroom to their own lives.
“NESCAC talks a lot about the athlete experience. And what we’re doing is the ultimate athlete experience,” he said. “A lot of the reasons I came to Tufts is a lot of the reason I’m hoping to change this rule.”
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