ORONO — One more season. Just one more season, and then the New England Small College Athletic Conference will jump into the world of 21st-century college football.

Starting with the 2026 season, the conference will end its archaic and honestly silly prohibition of its football teams accepting bids to the NCAA Division III playoffs. It was a hot topic Wednesday as coaches from across the state gathered at the University of Maine for the Howard Vandersea Maine Chapter of the National Football Foundation kickoff luncheon.

“It’s been a theme since I’ve been (at Colby). It’s a question I raised when I got there. Why not?” said Jack Cosgrove, who is entering his eighth season as Colby’s head coach after serving as UMaine’s head coach for 23 years.

Why not? It goes back to the NESCAC’s infatuation with doing things the Ivy League way. For years, the Ivy League declined to send teams to the Football Championship Subdivision playoffs. The stated reason was concerns about academic conflicts and safety, which totally ignored the academic conflicts and safety concerns experienced by athletes in every other sport. NESCAC teams have routinely made deep NCAA tournament runs. Last spring, for example, three of the final four teams in the Division III women’s lacrosse tournament were NESCAC rivals Middlebury, Tufts and Colby. In men’s lacrosse, Tufts and Bowdoin were in the final four.

Over the last 30 years, NESCAC teams have won numerous national titles, but the conference’s football teams haven’t had that opportunity. Now, that’s about to change, and Bowdoin coach BJ Hammer thinks his conference will hold its own.

“We were the only sport that wasn’t allowed to go. I think everyone’s come to the right decision, and this will be special. The first NESCAC team that gets to do it, I’d love for it to be Bowdoin. It’s a great experience,” Hammer said.

For decades, NESCAC football players saw their friends who play other sports compete in the NCAA playoffs, and often win national titles. Football, meanwhile, stayed more isolated than North Korea.

“There was a little bit of jealousy, for sure. We thought, we don’t we get this chance?” said Quinn Woods, who graduated from Bates in 2023 after a fine career as the left guard on the Bobcats offensive line. Woods is now an assistant coach at Bridgton Academy. “We definitely did talk about it. We used to scrimmage other Maine teams for JV games, and we’d have success against teams like Husson. It definitely crossed our minds when I was at Bates.”

For years, NESCAC football teams didn’t play every conference opponent, as the league chose to play an eight-game schedule instead of nine. The league finally went to a nine-game schedule in 2017.

There’s still some work to be done before the NESCAC football playoff era begins. Cosgrove noted the league still kicks off from the 40-yard line instead of the 35 like the rest of college football, so that’s a minor detail that needs to change. NESCAC rosters are capped at 84 players, while teams in other leagues routinely carry 100 or more. The league will continue to start preseason later than other schools and begin the regular season in mid-September, after the rest of college football has played a few games.

Recruiting will no doubt change, too. Schools with a high academic standard in other leagues used to be able to use the NESCAC’s postseason stance as a cudgel. Don’t go to Bates, Bowdoin or Colby, kid. Come to Johns Hopkins. Come to Carnegie Mellon.

It doesn’t mean NESCAC schools are suddenly going to start admitting football players who don’t meet the grade. If you’re a C student with mediocre test scores, it won’t matter if you can play football.

“We’re still going to recruit the best and the brightest. You have to fit our funnel, which is incredibly small anyways. I think we’re finding the right football guys anyway,” Hammer said. “I think it answers a question. Honestly, I get asked that by a lot of recruits. We recruit nationally at Bowdoin… Now we don’t have to answer that question anymore.”

The next battle could be adding a 10th game, which would allow each NESCAC team to play one nonconference opponent. There are three NESCAC schools in Maine, and three Maine members of the Conference of New England: Husson, the University of New England and Maine Maritime. It makes too much sense for them to match up and rotate playing each other every season.

Cosgrove is right, though. It’s not a fight to take on now.

“I don’t know if we’d be pushing our luck trying to get that 10th game or not. We’ve got to spend a little time being thankful we got the playoffs,” he said. “There will come a time and a place where the need to ask for a 10th game, extending our preseason, those topics will come up, because we’re still going to be at a disadvantage going into the playoffs.”

One more season until NESCAC joins the rest of the Division III football community. It’s long overdue.