Yankee Conference

The Yankee Conference was a collegiate sports conference in the eastern United States. It once sponsored competition in many sports, but eventually became a football-only league. Although not under the same charter, it is essentially an ancestor of today's Colonial Athletic Association (CAA) football conference.

The Yankee Conference essentially was formed in 1938 as the New England Conference. The NCAA however considers the Yankee Conference and New England Conference to be two separate conferences, as they were formed under different charters.

Formation
In 1945, Northeastern University, the only private school in the New England Conference, announced its departure. This led the remaining four members, all land-grant universities in New England, to form a committee to explore the formation of a new conference. The committee recommended that the four current members join with two New England land-grant institutions, the University of Massachusetts and the University of Vermont. This led to the formation of the Yankee Conference in 1946, with athletic competition beginning in the 1947–48 school year.

Charter members

 * University of Connecticut
 * University of Maine
 * University of Massachusetts Amherst (then Massachusetts State College)
 * University of New Hampshire
 * University of Rhode Island (then Rhode Island State College)
 * University of Vermont

Later history
In 1971, the College of the Holy Cross joined the conference in football for only a year, and in 1974, The University of Vermont dropped its football program. In 1975 the conference dropped sponsorship of all sports except football, after which many schools outside its original New England base joined the league.

It existed until 1997, when NCAA legislation limiting the influence of single-sport conferences over policy became effective, and then merged with the Atlantic 10 Conference (A10).

Overtime rule
The Yankee Conference was the first college football conference to implement college football's current overtime rules. The overtime rules known as the "Kansas Plan" or "Kansas Playoff" where each team is given a possession at the 25 yard line was used by the Yankee Conference to determine the end to tie games well before it was adopted by the rest of the NCAA in 1996.

Football champions
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