Colby College football coach Jack Cosgrove says the decision to allow NESCAC football programs a chance to compete in the NCAA Division III playoffs is a longtime coming. Rich Abrahamson/Morning Sentinel

Jack Cosgrove embraced the peculiarities of New England Small College Athletic Conference football when he was named Colby College’s head coach in 2018. But there was one that he couldn’t understand.

Going back to 1973, the NESCAC barred all its athletic teams from competing in the NCAA Division III playoffs in order to maintain a focus on conference championships. The conference changed course in 1993-94, when it allowed teams in all sports except football to compete for national championships.

“I had a hard time understanding that when I got here,” said Cosgrove, who coached the University of Maine from 1993-2015. “(Competing in the playoffs) is something that’s been a part of the NESCAC and this campus in every sport except for football. … I think change has been long overdue.”

That change has finally come. Starting in 2026, NESCAC will allow its football teams to go to the Division III playoffs, a decision that has been met with overwhelming approval at Maine’s three NESCAC schools and the conference at large.

“It was frustrating because we never got to show our competitiveness on a national scale,” said Bates football coach Matt Coyne, a former quarterback at fellow NESCAC school Wesleyan. “To be able to play out of conference, we didn’t have that opportunity. Now (with the change), it helps us compete and show what we’re made of.”

A big impetus for the change came in December when the Division I Ivy League announced it would be opting into the Football Championship Subdivision playoffs beginning in 2025. That prompted a real movement in the NESCAC — whose schools are sometimes referred to as “Little Ivies” and often follow in the conference’s footsteps — to make a similar push.

“We really kind of model ourselves like (the Ivy League), and when that happened, I think that’s what kind of created the push for it this spring like there was,” Cosgrove said. “When they made that move to go that way, I think it left us saying, ‘Hey, we need to address this because it’s wrong.’”

A NESCAC Football Players Association was formed in January with the purpose of pushing the league, with the help of each school’s student-athletic advisory committees, to make its teams eligible for the Division III playoffs. Three months later, on April 18, the conference officially approved an automatic NCAA bid for the league champion.

Bates College football coach Matt Coyne is excited about the recent change that will allow NESCAC football teams to compete in the NCAA Division III playoffs starting in 2026. Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal

“It wasn’t just football players and football people; there was inclusivity from all (sports),” Coyne said. “They were able to provide information and a push to our senior level administrators and all the way up to our presidents that this is something, we feel, would benefit our conference and should be an opportunity that our football players get.”

The chance for postseason play is a welcome move for the entire conference, but especially for perennial contenders such as Trinity, which has won the league title in eight of the past 16 seasons under coach Jeff Devanney.

Devanney knows what competing for a national championship can mean to a school. The Trinity men’s basketball team just won the NCAA Division III title, producing what he called an “incredible” outpouring of school spirit. A similar campus buzz came when the school hosted the Division III men’s hockey championships in 2024.

“You look at what that brought to the campus and what it means to those athletes and those coaches, and it was awesome,” said Devanney, Trinity’s coach since 2006. “I just think it’s been a long time coming that our football student-athletes get to have that same experience.”

Results from other sports suggest the conference can compete nationally. In addition to Trinity’s men’s basketball, Amherst men’s soccer and Middlebury field hockey also have won national titles this academic year. Devanney and Bowdoin football coach B.J. Hammer also pointed to women’s lacrosse, in which six NESCAC teams were selected for the upcoming NCAA tournament.

NESCAC schools could receive a boost in the recruiting process as well.

“If we’re crossing over (in trying to recruit a player against) a Johns Hopkins or Carnegie Mellon, those guys have been in the playoffs recently,” Hammer said. “That helps us. If (their recruiters say), ‘Well, you’ll never play in the playoffs (at a NESCAC school),’ guess what? Now we can. It just adds a little bit.”

Tim Ryan, the athletic director at Bowdoin, said the decision to begin postseason play in 2026 rather than this coming fall was a logistical one. The NESCAC, he said, must still decide how to produce a league champion in the event of a tie atop the standings and also wants to allow institutions time to prepare for a shift to postseason participation.

“It’s a great opportunity,” said Ryan, who captained Bowdoin’s 1997 football team and was an assistant coach for the Polar Bears from 2005-07. “A lot of the focus in athletics is on what comes next on a day-to-day basis. … It’s something that a lot of athletes in our conference will be looking forward to.”

Kennebec Journal sports writer Dave Dyer contributed to this report.