Michigan Appalachian State line of scrimmage

college football College football (french: Football universitaire) refers to gridiron football played by teams of student athletes. It was through college football play that American football in the United States, American football rules first gained populari ...

, the Group of Five are five

athletic conference An athletic conference is a collection of sports teams, playing competitively against each other in a sports league. In many cases conferences are subdivided into smaller divisions, with the best teams competing at successively higher levels. Conf ...

s whose members are part of

NCAA Division I NCAA Division I (D-I) is the highest level of intercollegiate athletics sanctioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the United States, which accepts players globally. D-I schools include the major collegiate athleti ...

Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS). The five conferences are the

American Athletic Conference The American Athletic Conference (The American or AAC) is an American collegiate athletic conference, featuring 11 member universities and five affiliate member universities that compete in the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) ...

(American),

Conference USA Conference USA (C-USA or CUSA) is an intercollegiate athletic conference whose current member institutions are located within the Southern United States. The conference participates in the NCAA's Division I in all sports. C-USA's offices are ...

(C-USA),

Mid-American Conference The Mid-American Conference (MAC) is a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I collegiate athletic conference with a membership base in the Great Lakes region that stretches from Western New York to Illinois. Nine of the t ...

(MAC),

Mountain West Conference The Mountain West Conference (MW) is one of the collegiate athletic conferences affiliated with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) (formerly I-A). The MW officially began operations ...

(MW), and

Sun Belt Conference The Sun Belt Conference (SBC) is a collegiate athletic conference that has been affiliated with the NCAA's Division I since 1976. Originally a non-football conference, the Sun Belt began sponsoring football in 2001. Its football teams particip ...

(SBC or Sun Belt).

Division I football conferences

The Group of Five conferences are five of the ten conferences in NCAA Division I FBS. The other five FBS conferences are informally known as the

Power Five The Power Five conferences are the five most prominent and highest-earning athletic conferences in college football in the United States. They are part of the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) of NCAA Division I, the highest level of collegiat ...

. In addition, a number of schools compete in FBS as independents in football. The terms Group of Five and Power Five are not formally defined by the

National Collegiate Athletic Association The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a nonprofit organization that regulates student athletics among about 1,100 schools in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. It also organizes the athletic programs of colleges ...

(NCAA), and the precise origins of the terms are unknown. However, each of the ten conferences are named in the NCAA's Division I manual. A notable difference between the Group of Five and Power Five are designated areas of institutional autonomy granted to member institutions of the Power Five conferences. The Group of Five is often considered disadvantaged as to the Power Five, as its constituent members do not have similar access to

New Year's Six The New Year's Six, sometimes abbreviated as NY6, is an unofficial but commonly used term used to describe the following NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) bowl games: the Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Orange Bowl, Cotton Bowl, Peach Bowl ...

College Football Playoff The College Football Playoff (CFP) is an annual postseason knockout invitational tournament to determine a national champion for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), the highest level ...

bowls Bowls, also known as lawn bowls or lawn bowling, is a sport in which the objective is to roll biased balls so that they stop close to a smaller ball called a "jack" or "kitty". It is played on a bowling green, which may be flat (for "flat-gr ...

. Since the BCS era, this has been an ongoing area of contention among NCAA Division I schools. In November 2012, agreement was reached to guarantee a spot in one of the New Year's Six bowl games to a team from one of the Group of Five conferences, beginning with the 2014 football season. On December 5, 2021,

Cincinnati Cincinnati ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located at the northern side of the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers, the latter of which marks the state line w ...

became the first Group of Five team to make the College Football Playoff. In sports other than football (mainly basketball), conferences outside of the Power Five are known as mid-major conferences.

Current conferences and teams

The ten current FBS conferences are listed below. For the Group of Five, the football members of each conference are also listed. Independent NCAA Division I FBS teams are listed in a third table. ''Tables reflect conference memberships as of the 2022 football season.'' ;Power Five ;Independents

Map of Group of Five teams

References

{{reflist, 30em