League slate takes shape
Two divisions and six games, with first game March 6, last April 17
The University at Albany football team will play in a Colonial Athletic Association that's split into two divisions with a six-game league schedule in the spring, the CAA announced Wednesday.
Conference play will begin on March 6 and end on April 17. The pairings for the 16-team
Football Championship Subdivision playoffs will be announced on April 18.
The Great Danes will have room to play up to two nonconference games leading up to the CAA contests. The NCAA is allowing Football Championship Subdivision programs to play up to eight regular-season games starting as early as Jan. 23.
Ualbany head coach Greg Gattuso said the nonconference games could also be against CAA teams, just not counted in the league standings.
"We're just all in the early phases of putting this stuff together now," Gattuso said. "There's an eight-game schedule we'll try to fill. Travel's going to be a factor and we'll try to fill a schedule we feel good about."
The CAA will not play a conference championship game between the North and South to determine the league's automatic bid to the NCAA playoffs, a possibility that had been discussed. Instead, the team with the best overall conference record will get the automatic bid with a tiebreaker being used if
divisional champions finish with the same record. The NCAA will hold a 16-team playoff that runs through mid-may.
"I would love to play a championship game every year for our conference, but we just want to play football, and whatever the format looks like, we'll be happy and excited about it," Gattuso said.
The CAA said the makeup of the divisions and the final conference schedule will be announced in the next several weeks.
Like every other FCS conference, the CAA postponed its fall season into the spring because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“All of our institutions know that today ’s announcement is simply the first step in the planning process associated with playing football on each of our campuses in the spring,” CAA commissioner Joe D’antonio said in a news release. “Each member institution, as well as the conference office, has additional protocols that must be finalized and approved in order to ensure a safe return to the field. Our goal in creating this unique scheduling format was to implement a competitive model while also trying to
reduce the risks associated with travel as much as we could."
Gattuso said it will be a couple of weeks before the Great Danes know when they'll start practicing. Team athletic activities are currently on pause at Ualbany because of a COVID -19 outbreak attributed partly to athletes.
"Football-wise, I just worry about my kids," Gattuso said. "We like to be
around them. I think student-athletes do better when they have structure and they have coaches and we're all talking and working together. We're looking forward to getting back to that. Everything we're doing right now is focused on academics with them, trying to keep them on board."