William and Mary Joins The Patriot League In Football, A Journey More Than Forty Years In The Making

BETHLEHEM, PA – “There’s always been a focus on football expansion,” Jennifer Heppel, executive director of the Patriot League told me this week. “and there have been conversations for decades with different schools around the possibility of joining the Patriot League in football. It’s been a priority of mine over the last 10 years.”

Late last week, for the second year in a row, an announcement was made that the Patriot League football would be adding a new member.

Following the announcement in 2024 that Richmond would be joining the Patriot League in the fall of 2025, Richmond’s biggest Rival William & Mary announced that they would be joining the Spiders in Patriot League football starting with the 2026 season.

The move came as a surprise in one significant way – that the Tribe would be moving in football only, keeping all of their other sports, including men’s and women’s soccer and basketball, in the CAA.

The idea of William and Mary becoming a football-only affiliate in the Patriot League was a concept that many people didn’t think was on the table.

“While we’ve always considered them an attractive member,” Jennifer told me, “that tie with [full CAA] membership just sort of seemed, from my perspective, that [the Tribe] probably weren’t going to be a football possibility. Much more recently, they reached out and said, ‘This is something we’d like to do.’ Would you consider it? And at that point, moved pretty quickly,”

By thinking outside the box, the Tribe ended up with, from their perspective, the best of all worlds, joining their historic football Rival in the Patriot League for football, while preserving everything else about their athletics department in the CAA.

Ironically, too, William & Mary at that moment went full circle with the Patriot League, finally joining the football league that they joined, then abandoned, in the early 1980s.

It’s not easy to say that you’re a part of two athletic conferences you helped found, but William & Mary can make that claim.

William & Mary, Founding Member of the Patriot League

Not everyone remembers, but William & Mary were nearly founding members of the Patriot League.

Richmond and William & Mary were in a conference they helped found, the Colonial Athletic Association. It was an all-sports conference that didn’t sponsor football – both Richmond’s and WIlliam & Mary’s football teams remained independents, force-classified to I-AA once the larger schools forced arbitrary football requirements that the Spiders and Tribe could not meet.

At the same time, the Ivy League was also re-classified to I-AA, and the Ivy League was trying to find their place, too.

“In 1983 Howard Swearer, president of Brown and the Ivy League presidents’ group,” The New York Times reported, “sent Anthony [Maruca], vice president of public affairs at Princeton, on a mission. The Ivy presidents, having little confidence in the NCAA’s efforts at reforming college football, were looking about in the East for colleges that shared their belief that good football can be played with good football players within a high academic framework.”

There was another, less public relations-friendly reason the Ivy League went on their search – they needed to find someone, anyone, at the I-AA level that they would able to schedule somewhat regionally.

Army and Navy were set to disappear from their out-of-conference schedules, as would the hodgepodge of I-A Eastern schools they could schedule.

Maruca went looking and found six college Presidents who eagerly sought out an affiliation with the Ivy League.

Three of them – Colgate’s George Langdon, William & Mary’s Thomas Graves, and Bucknell’s Dennis O’Brien, were Ivy League alums, and William & Mary and Colgate had provided critical support for the Ivy Amendment that allowed them all to remain in I-A when the I-AA split happened.

On November 6th, 1983, a splashy two-page article appeared in The Suffolk (NY) Newsday which detailed the Ivy League’s thinking at the time.

“What came out at first was a scout, and explorer in the form of Maruca, who set said from the Ivy island… stuck a flag in the sand at Bucknell, Colgate, Holy Cross, Lafayette, Lehigh, and William & Mary,” the article stated almost in prose. “And called it the Colonial League. Perfect. The Ivy establishing its own colony. The world is round.”

While sort of cringe looking at it through today’s eyes, it detailed the philosophy that was being shopped – a philosophy eagerly embraced by two true believer Colonial presidents, Lehigh’s Peter Likins and Holy Cross’ Rev. Father John E. Brooks, of the Colonial League adopting the Ivy League way of “doing” college football at that time. That meant no spring practices, no I-AA Playoffs, no freshman eligibility, and most importantly and controversially, no football scholarships (other than those based on general need).

“The six Colonial schools intend to form a so-called ‘presidents’ league, in the Ivy mold,” the article continued, “whereby all football policy will be determined by the head administrators, with athletic directors making ‘recommendations only’.”

While the flowery article tried to go out of its way to say that the Ivy League wouldn’t impose Ivy League rules on the Colonial, it was pretty clear that that was the direction the league would go.

And with presidential control, if the Patriot League Presidents wanted to impose a no-scholarship policy – inspired by the Ivy League Presidents, over the wishes of the players, fans, coaches and administrators -they could.

Ironically, this imperial attitude almost caused the league to not form at all.

William & Mary Leaves Colonial Experiment

Allegedly the name “Colonial League” was offered to the new upstart league by William & Mary’s President, Thomas Graves.

By the spring of 1985, that was all that would remain of William & Mary’s presence in the new upstart league they had spend more than a year to help form.

“William & Mary’s potential affiliation with the league was placed in jeopardy Saturday when it was learned three league members – Lafayette, Lehigh, and Bucknell – would oppose grants-in-aid when the league begins in 1986,” The Daily Press reported in the winter of 1984.

(Grants-in-aid is a form of scholarship where the student goes through the financial aid office to determine need, and the amount that the student was deemed eligible to pay could instead be converted into a grant, effectively making it a scholarship. Apparently this was how William & Mary was planning on continuing to offer football scholarships to its players.)

“I’m not in a position to confirm that the league is in trouble,”, William & Mary athletic director Jim Copeland said. “But I can tell you this: Our school intends to keep our football scholarships.”

The Indians, led by head coach Jimmye Laycock, had just gotten some good success at the I-AA level and were a whisker away from qualifying for the I-AA playoffs that season. Only a thrilling 33-31 win by Richmond, a battle of nationally ranked teams in front of over 21,000 fans, kept Laycock’s team from the postseason.

But it wasn’t so much the success of William & Mary’s football team that had the Colonial league in trouble. It was the way they were coming up with their policies.

“The presidents of the Ivy League were dealing only with presidents of the six Colonial League teams. It was their charter with little, or no, input from athletic directors,” The Daily Press reported in 1985.

Athetic director Jim Copeland and William & Mary’s Board of Visitors claimed they were “misled” and said they thought they would be “permitted to retain maximum football scholarships under NCAA I-AA provisions (now 70) unless, down the road, the Indians dominated,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported. “That, as it develops, was erroneous information.”

For better or worse, it seemed like William & Mary’s athletics administration felt like they could work around a scholarship policy with grants-in-aid, but that nuance or policy was either not considered or rejected by a group of Presidents who were unwilling or unable to compromise on the principle.

More broadly, it seems more than anything the rules of the league were being made by twelve college presidents who had closed themselves off from input from their athletics directors and coaches.

Another aspect that didn’t seem to be grasped by the Presidents was the I-AA Playoffs. They mattered.

Lehigh, Colgate, and Holy Cross all had a taste of the I-AA Playoffs, and liked it (with William & Mary very close to making it themselves). Being a part of a national championship conversation was something that brought excitement to their schools, national rankings, and fans to their games. While their presidents didn’t seem to be paying attention, a lot of people in those communities sure did, and more national exposure came as a result.

But the Colonial schools were supposed to give that up – a wildly unpopular move – to be in alignment with the Ivy League’s decision not to play in the postseason.

One by one unpopular moves were piling up, and the athletic directors felt like they were not being listened to, and ultimately that caused William & Mary to exit discussions.

Looking for options, Richmond had recently joined the football-only Yankee Conference. William & Mary decided to join them there, preserving their Rivalry for conference play, joining Delaware/Villanova, UNH/Maine and other long standing Yankee Conference Rivalries involving UMass, UConn and Rhode Island.

But over time, William & Mary always kept an eye on the Patriot League. Even though for decades the Yankee Conference, which would morph into Atlantic 10 football and then CAA football, the lines of communication were always open.

Phone Lines Open for William & Mary

To some, the stability of the Patriot League has been downright boring over the last two decades. Boston University and Loyola (MD), were accepted as all-sports members in 2012, and the Patriot League membership for more than a decade has been almost annoyingly stable.

As college athletics has been undergoing significant change, that annoying stability appears to more and more becoming a strength, making them more of an attractive landing spot.

Over the years – even with all sports membership in the CAA – the Tribe kept the lines of communication open, and were following what was happening in the Patriot League closely.

According to FOIA information shared publicly on a William & Mary blog at the time, William and Mary inquired about the Patriot League in 2009, a time when the schools in the conference were thinking about restructuring their aid from need-based scholarships to the traditional types of scholarships offered by the rest of FCS football.

Then-William & Mary AD Terry Driscoll was quoted as saying “Their hope was to create a southern division of the Patriot League with W&M and Richmond as the anchors.”

This flirtation and maintaining of a relationship shows that even years after its foundation, there was a lot both sides had in common. William & Mary saw the Patriot League as like minded institutions, with many athletes and prospective students coming from Northern states, and was interested in competing. And the Patriot League never really totally gave up on their dream of a “southern division”, or at least a “southern outpost”.

“While academically they “look” more like us and athletic aid brings them closer to us athletically,” Driscoll’s communication continued, “we are very different in culture and structure. However, if our goal is to have a competitive athletic program that seeks a balanced pursuit of academic and athletic excellence then the Patriot League could be an option.”

Fast forwarding to today, Executive Director Jennifer Heppel was quick to credit a litany of other people behind the scenes and people over the years that caused the move to happen. She gave particular credit to Richmond, whose move to the Patriot League last year was “incredibly important.”

“That helped William & Mary with their decision and comfort level,” she said.

Critically, too, was a litany of changes to the Patriot League that made it a very different environment than 1985.

Scholarships are the way of the Patriot League. While emphasizing that all associate members like Richmond and William & Mary operate under the same rules as full members, Heppel said the other rules were something that both schools were comfortable with.

“Richmond going in, without reducing anything that they were doing in football, we took notice of that,” William & Mary AD Brian Mann told The Richmond Times-Dispatch last week. “And so when the conversation started up not long ago, we had a different perspective on how the Patriot League was viewing their future.”

It was an interesting mix of relative stability, and incremental change over time, that has served the Patriot League extremely well.

“The presidents and athletic directors are consistently meeting and sitting in a room together, and they trust each other, Heppel told me. “We know where athletics falls. what it means for our institutions, and it’s incredibly important, but it is a function of the educational mission of our institutions. It’s not a separate LLC. Football is culturally important on the fabric of our campuses, at William & Mary, Richmond, Fordham, and Georgetown, it’s incredibly important, but it is a function of the educational mission of our institutions. And it’s really, really nice to work in that mission-driven environment, because it streamlines your decision making and it focuses you.

“And if you trust each other, you kind of let go of a little bit of the pages of regulation, because you can say, I know you I want to be in this room with you.”

Patriot League Football: Conference of Rivalries

If you go to the Wikipedia page for “List of most-played college football series in NCAA Division I” and look at the Top 5 entries, you see two future Patriot League football matchups: Lehigh/Lafayette (“The Rivalry”, 160 meetings) and now Richmond/William & Mary (“The Capital Cup”, 135 meetings).

The idea of the Patriot League being the home of both of these storied Rivalries is something that’s exciting to followers of the League.

One factor that seemed very important was not only preserving the “Capital Cup”, but having it on the last Saturday of the regular season, keeping with tradition.

When Richmond left the CAA, both the Spiders and William & Mary made a effort to preserve the historic Rivalry, despite the schools being in different conferences. In a release made a month ago, William & Mary announced that they were able to preserve the traditional November date in 2026, but in 2026 they were only able to schedule it on other weeks, fitting in with both schools’ out-of-conference schedules.

With the announcement they are joining the Patriot League, Ms. Heppel said that “like with Lehigh/Lafayette, we’ll honor [the Capital Cup] Rivalry, and the traditional date that they play on.”

That’s terrific news for both the Tribe and Spiders, who now will be able to keep their traditional Rivalry on their traditional Rivalry weekend.

It also sets up an exciting opportunity for the Patriot League too.

“I think it comes down to a couple of things for us,” current William & Mary AD Brian Mann said this week. “First is, we wanted to be connected to the University of Richmond and play them in football every year, and when we can do it the last Saturday before Thanksgiving with the hopes that that game will have some postseason implications, that’s a place where we want to be.”

Heppel seems excited that the Patriot League will be the home of not only “The Rivalry” (Lehigh and Lafayette, 161st meeting), and “The Capital Cup” (Richmond and William & Mary, 136th meeting), but also potentially the “Ram-Crusader Cup” (Holy Cross and Fordham, 63rd meeting) as well. Additionally, when Colgate and Bucknell play each other this year, it will be the 68th meeting between the two schools.

“It lines up for a nice Rivalry weekend,” she said. “It’s important for the fans and schools, and when the FCS account tweets college football’s most played Rivalries, two Patriot League rivalries will be right there.”