Merrimack and Sacred Heart will play for the Yankee Conference championship

Merrimack and Sacred Heart will play for the Yankee Conference Championship on November 16, when the teams meet at Duane Stadium.

From Extra Points:

If you’re a college football fan of a certain age in the New England or Mid-Atlantic area, you probably remember the Yankee Conference. From the mid 1970s to the 1990s, the Yankee was a football-only league, featuring schools like UConn, Maine, Rhode Island, William & Mary and Northeastern. The conference regularly pumped out top 20 teams and sent multiple teams to the playoffs in the 1990s.

But the league merged with the Atlantic 10 in the fall of 1996 and adopted that league’s branding. Today, a few of those old Yankee Conference teams, like Boston University and Vermont, don’t play football at all. The rest are scattered between the FBS, CAA and Patriot League.

College football in New England certainly isn’t dead, but the Yankee Conference was.

Until now.

Earlier today, Sacred Heart and Merrimack, two FCS squads who compete as independents, announced they will play for the Yankee Conference Championship on November 16th. The matchup is presented by LEONA, a college sports consulting company who was instrumental in bringing back the league’s old IP.

No, this isn’t a new football conference for the Warriors. At least, not yet. The NCAA has a moratorium on single-sport conferences, so the conference can’t officially return as a league.

LEONA, a consulting company, purchased the IP. That allows them to use the trademarks and stage a championship game.

Merrimack and Sacred Heart are FCS independents, which made them a perfect fit.

More from Extra Points:

Dan Gale, the president of LEONA, told me he grew up listening to Yankee Conference Games on the radio in New Jersey, and didn’t want the history and iconography of the league to vanish forever. After buying the trademarks and clearing any potential confusion with the New York Yankees, the legal pathway became clear for some sort of return….and the Merrimack/Sacred Heart game, to him, is a perfect launchpad.

The most important thing, he told me, is that now every athlete at Merrimack and Sacred Heart will be able to play for a trophy. As independents, both squads would be a deep longshot to earn at-large bids to the FCS Playoff. But with a win on the 16th, they can walk away with all the trappings of a championship…from hoisting a trophy, to championship shirts, to a place in the record books.

LEONA tracked down the original Yankee Conference trophy. William & Mary, who won the league’s last championship, had the trophy.

From Extra Points:

The driving force, beyond wanting to preserve history, was to help create a new opportunity for athletes. Beyond that single game, LEONA sources indicated to me they’d be interested in looking at ways to monetize or build on their Yankee Conference license ownership, such as licensing the marks for t-shirts or other apparel (they already operate a Yankee Conference store). Perhaps other game or event opportunities will appear later on.

Maybe there’s a real business opportunity in bringing back vintage collegiate conference IP for licensing or event purposes. Maybe this mean somebody else will bring back the Metro Conference, or the Border Intercollegiate, or the Mountain States Conference. I don’t know who still owns the old marks and history to the Southwest Conference, but I have to imagine that IP is worth something, right?

Or maybe not. Maybe all this becomes is a chance for 40-somethings to indulge their nostalgia for a moment, and for two FCS football teams to get a chance to hoist a trophy.

And if that’s all this is, well, that’s still pretty good.