2017 NCAA Division III football season
American college football season
The 2017 NCAA Division III football season was the portion of the 2017 college football season organized by the NCAA at the Division III level in the United States. Under Division III rules, teams were eligible to begin play on August 31, 2017. The season ended with the NCAA Division III Football Championship, also known as the Stagg Bowl, on December 15, 2017, at Salem Football Stadium in Salem, Virginia. Mount Union earned their 13th national title, defeating defending national champions Mary Hardin–Baylor.
Conference and program changes
The 2017 season saw several significant changes to the landscape of Division III football:
The New England Football Conference, a football-only league that had operated since 1965, became the football league of the all-sports Commonwealth Coast Conference (CCC), operating as Commonwealth Coast Football (CCC Football). The football league remains a separate entity from the overall conference.
The New England Women's and Men's Athletic Conference began sponsoring football.
The Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference, which had sponsored football since its creation in 1962 as the College Athletic Conference, ended sponsorship of football at the end of the 2016 season. The league had lost most of its membership when seven schools left in 2012 to form the Southern Athletic Association.
The New England Small College Athletic Conference eliminated its members' annual pre-season scrimmages in favor of a 9th regular season game and ensuring all conference members play one another each season.
“2017 NCAA Division III football season” enters the record as american college football season. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what NCAA, Division and football can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q29096716. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2017, 1965, 1962 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “2017 NCAA Division III football season” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.