GAME PREVIEW: Alcorn State vs. North Carolina Central (MEAC/SWAC Challenge)
644 days… That’s how long it will be between games for NCCU when the Eagles take the field on Saturday against Alcorn State in the Cricket MEAC/SWAC Challenge.
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644 days… That’s how long it will be between games for NCCU when the Eagles take the field on Saturday against Alcorn State in the Cricket MEAC/SWAC Challenge.
COVID-19 has caused several programs to opt out of the 2021 spring football season. Still, there are several teams who are continuing on with the season. One of those programs is Southern who defeated Alabama State 24-21 to open its season on Friday and was voted No. 1 in the BOXTOROW Coaches and Media Polls.
Two games involving MEAC and SWAC teams remain on the schedule for this week.
It was supposed to be the triumphant return of FCS football competition, this time in the spring. The MEAC tried very hard, ingeniously, to celebrate an anniversary football season, even pushing it to the spring of 2021. But in the end, it couldn’t be saved.
The 2021 spring college football season is right around the corner and media members from across the country have selected the 2021 BOXTOROW HBCU Preseason Spring Football All-America Team.
The National Football Foundation (NFF) highlighted today the more than 310 schools and 35 conferences playing college football this spring at the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS), Division II, Division III and NAIA levels. FBS independent New Mexico State will also play games this spring.
Despite the bungling and mismanagement of the NCAA, President Mark Emmert and the Board of Governors, they still have one final chance to get on the right side of history and submit to reality.
The Patriot League’s dilemmas, whether the rest of FCS admits it or not, is the FCS’ dilemmas. And as we inch closer to an alleged 2020 college football season, the NCAA needs to make some things very clear before a huge mess happens.
Bethune-Cookman announced late Thursday that it will join the SWAC beginning in 2021 in a unanimous vote by the B-CU board of trustees, ending the affiliation it had with the MEAC since 1979.
Sixty student-athletes in the NCAA Division I Football’s Championship Subdivision have been named to the 2020 College Sports Journal Preseason FCS All-America Team.
Once upon a time, HBCUs were the place to draft NFL talent. But that hasn’t been the case lately.
This is the 14th year of BOXTOROW’s Top 10 HBCU FCS Recruiting Class Rankings. Recruiting at HBCUs has really stepped up, to the point that HBCUs are regularly landing recruits that would go to small to mid-sized FBS programs.
It’s the next-to-last weekend of FCS football action, and it’s going to be a jam-packed Saturday with three games to showcase the best of FCS football. The unofficial HBCU National Championship is on the line, while the FCS Playoff Final Four see who advances to Frisco.
Two-time defending national champion North Dakota State (12-0) tops the bracket as the number one seed after winning the Missouri Valley Football Conference. The Bison are making their 10th consecutive and 15th overall appearance in the championship.
Using the Sagarin ratings from this week alone to project the FCS playoffs, along with the automatic bid for the conferences that receive a bid, the following would be the playoff teams. These teams are seeded 1 through 24 for the 24 teams that make the FCS playoffs. The seven Division I win criteria was.
The FCS Playoff Committee has a pretty unenviable job this time around in trying to determine the playoff seeds. With a crazy day of upsets of Montana, South Dakota State, Illinois State and others, teams who looked like certain seeds suddenly look like they are going to be practicing on Thanksgiving Day instead.
There were very few changes in the BOXTOROW Coaches and Media Polls as the teams that were expected to win did.
Just like that, we are down to the last week of the regular season. Selection Sunday comes to your airwaves thus Sunday November 24th at 11:30 AM on ESPNU. This past week, six of the ten automatic bids were sewn up. Those bids went to Monmouth (Big South), James Madison (CAA), North Dakota State (MVFC), Central Connecticut State (NEC), San Diego (Pioneer), Wofford (Southern). The Southland will be decided on Thursday night, while the Big Sky, Patriot and Ohio Valley will be decided on Saturday. The top 25 this week will look at each team from the prism of the playoffs.
I’ve been doing this FCS Playoff field predictions a very long time now, and it’s been a very strange year. It’s not customary for so many autobids to be in doubt this late in the season. But this week, a lot of results came in that clarified five of the autobids.
Two weeks to go, and how many autobids have been clinched? How about… none?
While FAMU had a bye week, losses coupled with upsets caused shifts in both the BOXTOROW Coaches and Media Polls. The Rattlers are the unanimous No. 1 in both polls for the first time in the history of the polls.
This week, the super spoiler FAMU has an bye week, and the conference has a lot of match ups that on paper should be easy wins for the top three teams in the title race. We do have an interesting batch up for a couple of teams looking to possibly go .500 on the season and as for the other lop sided games, and if we have learned anything from other conferences this year, it’s no to take any game for granted.
The North Carolina A&T Aggies win over South Carolina State in the marquee game of the weekend caused slight shifts in both the BOXTOROW Coaches and Media Polls. Florida A&M defeated Delaware State and remained No. 1.
There are three more football weekends to go before FCS Playoff Selection Sunday, where FCS Nation hopes ESPN pronounces all the schools’ names correctly and don’t forget to specify who is home, and who is away in the first round.
Remember when I had Villanova as a seed? Good times. Harken back to when I had Delaware in my field? Yes, way back when – last week. Do you recall the time that I had more than two Southland teams in my bracket? It’s so long ago, why, when it happened, North Dakota State and.
As Florida A&M handled Morgan State to win its second straight game and stay atop both the BOXTOROW Coaches and Media Polls, it was South Carolina State’s victory over Bethune-Cookman in Daytona Beach that caused movements in the polls.
As of right now, the FCS Playoff field feels like the show “Who’s Line Is It Anyway”, where the picks are just random improvisations of things that end up not making any sense. Nonetheless, we’ll keep pressing on, trying to figure out some version of truth.
As of Week 8, the top four teams in the MEAC have gone 17-5, with four losses to FBS teams. The only loss to FCS competition is when two of those teams played each other last week, when South Carolina State fell to FAMU 42-38. This week, the MEAC has a another match up that is garnering national attention, and for good reason.
The North Carolina A&T Aggies continue to hold the top spot in HBCU football as the newest rankings of the BOXTOROW Coaches and Media Polls were released on Monday. The Aggies received all of the first place votes in both polls.
The North Carolina A&T Aggies remain No.1 in the BOXTOROW Coaches and Media Polls for the fourth straight week. The Aggies’ reign as the top team in HBCU football goes back to Week 10 of the 2018 season. In the coaches poll, the most significant moves up were made by No. 5 Arkansas-Pine Bluff and.
Without question the top FCS game of the week was the battle of FCS powerhouses in the Fargodome.Returning home after 47-22 victory the week before against Delaware, the heavily-favored Bison had a very tough battle against visiting UC Davis, ultimately winning 27-16 after scoring a late touchdown to finally put the game in the win column for North Dakota State.
Week One saw quite a few Power 5 FBS teams celebrate wins against powerful FCS teams as if they had won a bowl game. Only one FCS program, Central Arkansas, managed to knock off an FBS opponent: for the second straight year, Western Kentucky was defeated by an FCS program
We are going to learn about plenty of MEAC teams after this opening weekend, especially when it
comes to North Carolina A&T going up against a power CAA foe in Elon, and a MEAC/SWAC clash
between Jackson State and Bethune-Cookman. A few FBS match ups have the potential for upsets, and we even have an in state rivalry.
MEAC Predicted Order of Finish Last season, North Carolina A&T were the Celebration bowl champions. This season, who is likely to be competing for a Celebration Bowl bid, and who’s likely to be sitting at home? Can the Aggies repeat, or will there be a new team headed to Atlanta this year? Would-Be Celebration Bowl.
The Aggies had impressive wins against Jacksonville State and FBS foe East Carolina, along with a couple of head scratching losses to Morgan State and Florida A&M. They won the Celebration Bowl, but I feel like most fans feel like they could have gone undefeated.
Bethune Cookman ended the season on a strong note, wrapping up their season at 8-4. Winning almost all the games they were supposed to, they’ll look back at an early season loss to Howard at home and wonder what might have been.
FAMU was oh-so-close to being “back” last year after years of losing records. After a 6-2 start, the Rattlers lost their last three games to finish 6-5, including a 33-19 loss to archrival Bethune-Cookman in the Florida Classic.
Few schools had a more confounding season last year than NCCU under interim coach Grant Eastman. After a 1-3 start, the Eagles stunned Howard 40-35, dominated Norfolk State 36-6, then inexplicably lost to one of the worst teams in the MEAC, Delaware State 18-13.
The Bison had very high expectations going into the season, but stumbled multiple times in MEAC play to fall to a 4-6 record.
A tough 1-4 start for “Buddy” Pough’s Bulldogs gave way to a great 4-1 stretch with a home win over Howard and a big road win vs. Florida A&M.
Another year, another 4-7 year for the Spartans.
The Bears had modest expectations under interim head coach Earnest T. Jones, and seemed to exceed those expectations greatly with their a 4-7 record, highlighted by perhaps the biggest win in FCS last season: Morgan State’s shocking 16-13 upset of North Carolina A&T 16-13 in Greensboro. The historic upset was not enough to have the “interim” label removed from Jones’ job description, however, and former Michigan running back Tyrone Wheatley was hired to become the Bears’ next head football coach.
After a brutal 0-7 start to the Rod Milstead era, the Hornets made a big turnaround by the end of the year, winning three of their final four games to salvage a 3-8 season. One of the wins, however, came against hapless USCAA school Virgina University of Lynchburg.
College Sports Journal’s NCAA 2019 College Football Team Previews are being released all summer, and we’re ranking all the Division I HBCUs from Number 20 to Number 1. Check back to see where your favorite HBCU is ranked!
It’s May. Spring football is over, and the preseason camps don’t start for a couple months. We are in the doldrums of the FCS offseason. But at this point, everyone is 0-0 and hope springs eternal. 127 schools think they have a shot to make the playoffs and compete for an FCS Championship in Frisco..
It’s becoming a habit for Aggie fans, trips to Atlanta in mid-December. That’s because North Carolina A&T is once again competing in the Celebration Bowl. In it’s four year history, this will be the third time the Aggies are the MEAC representative. The two other times they came to Atlanta, in 2015 and 2017, they won.
Florida A&M vs. Bethune-Cookman (Florida Classic) When: Saturday, November 17, 2:00PM Where: Camping World Stadium, Orlando, FL TV/Streaming: ESPN Classic, ESPN3 Florida A&M Rattlers Saturday’s loss by the Rattlers was not a conference game, so Florida A&M (6-4, 5-1 MEAC) can still win the league outright with a victory in next week’s Florida Blue Florida.
Though the field for the 2018 FCS Playoffs was clarified a little bit a week before the selection of the field, a chaotic upset-filled week not only thrust an unlikely team to a conference championship at autobid, it sets up a final weekend of the FCS regular season filled with meaningful games. About the only.
When: Saturday, October 6, 4:00 PM Where: Bragg Memorial Stadium, Tallahassee, FL TV/Streaming: ESPN3 Norfolk State Spartans Norfolk State (3-1) looks to extend its best start since 2011 when the Spartans play a key MEAC game at Florida A&M (2-2). Both teams are off to fast starts in MEAC play, with FAMU at 2-0 and NSU 1-0. Additionally,.
After two weeks, many teams are starting to show the FCS nation who they are. Some teams are racing up the ranking, while some are plummeting down after starting 0-2. There was only one FCS over FBS win this weekend. Maine went down the Western Kentucky and defeated the Hilltoppers despite falling behind 21-0 early.