The most recent ECAC Bowl slate was played on November 22, 2025, and one of the four games produced a first. Rowan University beat Utica University 26-20 in the Asa S. Bushnell Bowl, the program’s first ECAC bowl victory ever. Running back Nunes Bukula IV was named MVP after a 118-yard, one-touchdown afternoon, and the Profs closed the year 8-2-1, the most wins at Rowan since 2019.
The next slate is already on the calendar: Saturday, November 21, 2026, at campus sites, hosted by the higher seed.
If you’re catching up on what the ECAC Bowls actually are, and why a Division III program treats them as a real prize, this is the guide.
Table of Contents
- What are the ECAC Bowl Games?
- The four names, explained
- The Division I ECAC Bowl that no longer exists
- 2025 results
- How the format has changed since 1983
- Who wins these things
- What’s next: the 2026 bowls
- How teams get selected
- Going to a game
- Q&A
What are the ECAC Bowl Games?
The ECAC Bowls are a set of postseason football games run by the Eastern College Athletic Conference, an 85-year-old organization with more than 200 member schools spread across all three NCAA divisions. The conference sponsors championships, leagues, and tournaments throughout the Northeast, and football bowls have been part of that portfolio since 1983.
Here’s the thing that makes them structurally different from the FBS bowl calendar: they are not tied to one conference, and they are not played at neutral sites. The ECAC pulls qualifying teams from across the Northeast. The NJAC, the Empire 8, the Liberty League, the Middle Atlantic Conferences, the PAC, and independents all show up in the results, and the games are hosted on the higher seed’s campus in late November. There’s no bowl city, no week-long buildup, no corporate title sponsor. There’s a banner, a trophy, and one more Saturday.
For a Division III program that finished 6-4 or 7-3 and missed the 32-team NCAA field, that one extra Saturday is the entire postseason. It’s an extra three weeks of practice for a young roster, a send-off for seniors who’d otherwise end their careers on a Week 10 road trip, and, as Rowan found out in 2025, a piece of hardware that can go up on a wall.
The four names, explained
The modern bowls are named for four figures in ECAC history. This matters more than it usually does with bowl naming, because in this case the names are the institutional history.
Asa S. Bushnell Bowl. Bushnell was the ECAC’s founding director and first commissioner, serving from 1938 to 1970. A 1921 Princeton graduate, he was the fourth editor of the Princeton Alumni Weekly and Princeton’s first athletic director, a job he took during the Great Depression, where he kept 42 teams afloat while cutting $100,000 from the budget. At the ECAC he served as lead negotiator for the NCAA’s television rights, founded the ECAC Holiday Festival in 1952, and launched ECAC Division III hockey in 1961. He was inducted into the ECAC Hall of Fame in 2015. The Ivy League’s player-of-the-year award, the Asa S. Bushnell Cup, honors the same man.
A note for researchers: searching “Asa S. Bushnell” turns up a Republican governor of Ohio (1834-1904) who served between William McKinley and George K. Nash. That is the grandfather. The ECAC commissioner is Asa Smith Bushnell III. It’s an easy and very common mix-up.
James Lynah Bowl. Lynah is considered the principal founder of the ECAC. Born in Charleston in 1881, he played end for John Heisman at Clemson and was captain and quarterback for Pop Warner’s 1904 Cornell team. He and Joe Guyon are the only known players who can claim both coaches. After 15 years at DuPont and seven at General Motors, he became Cornell’s first director of athletics in 1935, and from that post led the movement that created the modern ECAC. Lynah Rink, Cornell’s hockey building, opened in 1957, a year after his death, and carries his name.
Robert M. “Scotty” Whitelaw Bowl. Whitelaw was ECAC commissioner from 1971 to 1989. Nearly 50 schools joined during his tenure, and by his retirement the conference was running more than 90 championships across 19 sports. He was the architect of the annual ECAC Hockey tournament, launched in 1962, and under his leadership the ECAC became one of the first conferences in the country to sponsor women’s championships.
Clayton Chapman Bowl. Chapman was a Cornell oarsman who was commodore of the undefeated 1957 crew that won the Grand Challenge Cup at Henley. He joined the ECAC as assistant commissioner in 1971 and became its fourth commissioner in 1989, serving until 1998. The IRA now presents a Clayton W. Chapman Trophy to its most improved program.
The Division I ECAC Bowl that no longer exists
There was, briefly, a Division I version, and it’s the reason you’ll sometimes see “ECAC Bowl” described as defunct.
From 1993 to 2003, the ECAC staged a single D-I game pitting the Northeast Conference champion against the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference champion, on campus sites. At the time the NEC, MAAC, and Pioneer Football League were the three conferences without automatic bids to the D-I football championship that hadn’t voluntarily opted out of the tournament. All three were non-scholarship leagues, and the game was their substitute for a playoff.
Every edition but one was played in New York State or Pennsylvania; the 1997 game, hosted by Georgetown, is the lone exception. The NEC came out ahead in the series, winning six of the ten games. Duquesne appeared in five of them, winning two.
The game died with its participants. By 2003 several MAAC schools were shutting down football, the bowl was shuttered, and the conference dropped the sport entirely in 2007. The NEC champion moved to the Gridiron Classic against the PFL champion from 2006 to 2009, and the whole problem resolved itself when the NEC received an automatic NCAA bid in 2010 and the PFL got one in 2013.
The Division III series, meanwhile, never stopped. It’s been running since 1983.
2025 results
Eight teams were selected by the ECAC Division III Football Committee and announced on November 17, 2025, via a live selection show hosted by James Baker and Frank Rossi. All four games kicked off on Saturday, November 22.
| Bowl | Result | Notes |
| Asa S. Bushnell | Rowan 26, Utica 20 | At Utica. Rowan’s first ECAC bowl win in program history. MVP: RB Nunes Bukula IV (118 yds, TD). |
| Clayton Chapman | RPI 35, St. John Fisher 24 | At St. John Fisher. RPI controlled the second half. |
| James Lynah | Hobart 42, Maritime College 14 | At Maritime. A 5-5 vs. 5-5 matchup on paper; not on the field. |
| Robert M. “Scotty” Whitelaw | SUNY Brockport 46, Geneva 10 | At Brockport. The most lopsided of the four. |
The Bushnell in detail. Utica took a 7-3 lead after one quarter, then Rowan hung 16 unanswered in the second while holding the Pioneers to 30 yards and no points. Utica outscored Rowan 13-7 after halftime but never got the lead back. Bukula IV and Tyshawn Bookman combined for 195 of Rowan’s 230 rushing yards, each finding the end zone once. Defensive back AJ Ryker led all tacklers with eight, adding 2.5 tackles for loss and an interception.
The win capped a four-game closing streak and the second year of head coach Pat Ruley’s tenure. Both regular-season losses came against top-25 conference opponents (Christopher Newport and Salisbury), and the tie was a season opener against Case Western Reserve called in the third quarter after weather delays.
How the format has changed since 1983
The ECAC has restructured this thing roughly every decade, and the naming conventions in old results tables reflect that.
- 1983: Two games, the Metro NY/NJ Bowl and the New England Bowl.
- 1984: Renamed to North and South.
- 1991: Expanded to four: Northeast, Northwest, Southeast, Southwest.
- 2002: Expanded to six or more, the original four plus North Atlantic and South Atlantic, with North Central (2010, 2013, 2014) and South Central (2008) appearing when enough teams qualified.
- 2015: The big change. All games moved to a single site across three days, and the geographic names were retired in favor of the honorific ones: Bushnell, Chapman, Lynah, Whitelaw, plus Legacy and Presidents.
- 2018: Back to campus sites, trimmed to the four bowls that survive today.
That 2018 contraction wasn’t a failure of interest so much as a redistribution of it. By then several conferences had launched bowls outside the ECAC structure, including the New England Bowl Series, the New York Bowl, and the Centennial-MAC Bowl Series.
The early years belong to a different cast than the modern ones. Wagner won the first ECAC bowl ever played, the 1983 Metro NY/NJ Bowl, beating St. John’s 48-7, then took South Bowl titles in 1985 and 1986. It later won the 1993 Division I game over Iona by 32-0, making it one of a small group with titles in both series. Very little of that 1980s field still appears in the modern bracket, which is part of why the results tables read like two different competitions stitched together.
Two years are missing from the record for reasons outside anyone’s control: 2020, when the entire slate was canceled by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2022 Clayton Chapman Bowl between Westminster and Brockport, called off for extreme winter conditions.
Who wins these things
Counting champions across the full published Division III results, a few programs separate themselves:
- RPI leads the field with roughly 13 bowl titles, spread from 1992 all the way to 2025, remarkable longevity for a program that keeps landing in the 7-3 range that qualifies you.
- Alfred is next with about 11, including a run of six in eight years from 2004 to 2011.
- Albright sits around 7.
- Springfield, Union, Cortland, St. John Fisher, Salisbury, and Washington & Jefferson cluster around 6 apiece.
St. John Fisher’s own athletics department keeps a clean ledger worth citing as a model: a 6-3 record in ECAC bowls entering 2025, 5-1 at home and 1-2 on the road. That home/road split is the pattern across the series generally, and it’s the practical argument for why seeding matters.
Fisher’s single-game bowl records give you a sense of what these games can look like: 63 points against Castleton in 2012, 589 total yards against RPI in 2010, 422 rushing yards in that same Castleton game. And they can go the other way. Brockport beat Hartwick 70-68 in the 2008 Northwest Bowl.
The flip side of the ledger belongs to Norwich, a member of the Great Northeast Athletic Conference for most sports. The Cadets have reached seven ECAC bowls (1984, 2003, 2004, 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2014) and lost all seven. No program in the series has more appearances without a title. Two of the seven were one-score games: a 28-27 loss to Springfield in the 2013 North Atlantic Bowl and a 27-21 overtime loss to Framingham State in 2010.
Framingham State is a footnote of its own. Both of its ECAC titles came in overtime, the 2010 Northeast Bowl over Norwich and the 2014 North Atlantic Bowl over RPI, 42-36. No other program in the published results has won more than one bowl that way.
The Pennsylvania schools form their own bloc in the results, and Wilkes is the clearest case: eight appearances between 1994 and 2010, three of them wins, every single one in the Southeast, Southwest, or South Atlantic bracket the ECAC used when it sorted teams geographically. Sort the old results by region and the southern brackets are almost entirely a Pennsylvania and Maryland affair. Maryland’s Frostburg State mirrors Wilkes almost exactly: eight appearances, three of them wins, one of which was a 24-21 decision over Wilkes in the 1996 Southeast Bowl. It also made the most convincing late return of any of these programs, winning the 2016 Asa S. Bushnell Bowl 38-14 over St. John Fisher.
New England runs the other way, heavy on appearances and light on hardware. Maine’s Husson is the compact version of that pattern: two trips, two losses, the second a 42-39 defeat to Salve Regina in the 2015 Clayton Chapman Bowl. Those 81 combined points make it the highest-scoring game of the three years the ECAC staged its bowls at a single site.
What’s next: the 2026 bowls
Per the ECAC’s published 2026-27 championship calendar:
- Date: Saturday, November 21, 2026
- Site: Campus sites
- Host: Higher seed
The calendar entry lists “Football Bowl Games” without specifying how many. The ECAC has run four since 2018, though 2024 fielded only three (Bushnell, Chapman, and Whitelaw, with no Lynah). The number depends on how many qualifying teams are available, so treat four as the expectation and three as a live possibility.
Expect the pairings to be announced roughly five days before kickoff. The 2025 selection show ran on November 17 for a November 22 slate.
How teams get selected
There’s no formula published, no committee rankings released weekly, no bracketology industry. The ECAC Division III Football Committee selects the field and announces it on a live show.
What the results tell you about the criteria:
You need a winning-ish record, but not a great one. The 2025 field ranged from 8-2 (Utica) down to 5-5 (Maritime and Hobart). Records in the 6-4 to 7-3 band are the sweet spot historically.
You need to have missed the NCAA tournament. The ECAC bowls are for teams left out of the 32-team D-III championship field, which is decided the same week. A team’s bowl eligibility is effectively determined by what doesn’t happen on Selection Sunday for the NCAA bracket.
Geography and travel are real factors. These are campus games played on short notice in late November. Pairings tend to be regional, and the committee is visibly balancing competitive matchups against bus-ride length.
Similar records get paired together. Look at 2025: 7-2-1 at 8-2, 7-3 at 7-3, 6-4 at 6-4, 5-5 at 5-5. That’s not an accident.
If you’re projecting, the practical move in early November is to track which regional teams are sitting at six or seven wins and are outside the NCAA bubble. That’s your field.
Going to a game
The logistics are the opposite of a New Year’s Day bowl trip, which is mostly good news.
Tickets. Handled by the host school’s athletics department, at regular-season prices. There’s rarely a sellout concern, but small D-III stadiums do have real capacity limits, so check the host site rather than assuming walk-up.
Kickoff times. Noon and 1:00 p.m. local were the 2025 windows. These are daytime games. Most D-III facilities in the Northeast have limited or no lighting, and late November sunset is around 4:30.
Weather. Plan for it seriously. This is the Northeast in the last week of November, and the 2022 Chapman Bowl was canceled outright for winter conditions. Dress for a stadium with metal bleachers and no roof.
Parking and access. Campus lots, generally free or cheap, generally close to the field. This is the part where a D-III bowl beats a CFP quarterfinal without an argument.
Watching from home. Host schools stream through their conference digital networks: Empire 8 Network, and the equivalents for the NJAC, Liberty League, MAC, and PAC. The ECAC posts box scores and recaps for each game on its own site, usually within hours.
Q&A
Q: Who won the most recent ECAC Bowls? On November 22, 2025: Rowan beat Utica 26-20 (Bushnell), RPI beat St. John Fisher 35-24 (Chapman), Hobart beat Maritime 42-14 (Lynah), and SUNY Brockport beat Geneva 46-10 (Whitelaw).
Q: When are the next ECAC Bowl Games? Saturday, November 21, 2026, at campus sites, hosted by the higher seed. Pairings should be announced the Monday of that week.
Q: What division are the ECAC Bowls? Division III. A separate Division I ECAC Bowl existed from 1993 to 2003, matching the Northeast Conference champion against the MAAC champion, but it was discontinued when MAAC schools began dropping football.
Q: How many ECAC Bowls are played each year? Four in most recent seasons (Bushnell, Chapman, Lynah, and Whitelaw), though only three were played in 2024. The count has ranged from two (1983-1990) to seven (2008, 2010, 2013, 2014) to six at a single site (2015-2017).
Q: Who are the bowls named after? Four ECAC figures: Asa S. Bushnell (founding director and first commissioner, 1938-1970), James Lynah (the conference’s principal founder and Cornell’s first AD), Scotty Whitelaw (commissioner, 1971-1989), and Clayton Chapman (commissioner, 1989-1998).
Q: Is the Asa S. Bushnell Bowl related to the Ivy League’s Bushnell Cup? Yes, same namesake. The Bushnell Cup has gone to the Ivy League’s football player of the year since 1970 (offensive and defensive players of the year since 2011), and is presented in partnership with the National Football Foundation.
Q: Have the ECAC Bowls ever been canceled? The full 2020 slate was canceled by COVID-19. The 2022 Clayton Chapman Bowl between Westminster and Brockport was canceled for extreme winter conditions.
Q: Which program has won the most? By a count of the published results, RPI, with roughly 13 titles between 1992 and 2025. Alfred is second with about 11.
