CAA Football Teams Schedule Lucrative FBS Matchups for 2026 Season

The Coastal Athletic Association has released its complete 2026 football schedule, and the headline for several member programs is the money sitting at the end of those nonconference road trips. New Hampshire will travel to Syracuse for $550,000, Hampton heads to Maryland for $475,000, and Campbell has a date with Florida worth $525,000. Elon, Maine, and Monmouth round out the group of CAA programs with notable FBS guarantee games on the slate, with Maine visiting Appalachian State and Monmouth scheduled to play Western Michigan for $310,000.

Conference play opens Thursday, Aug. 27, when Maine visits Towson in what figures to be a statement-setting early matchup. The bulk of the FBS trips fall on Sept. 5, when New Hampshire lines up at Syracuse, Hampton travels to College Park, Maine makes the trip to Boone to face Appalachian State, and Bryant heads to West Point to play Army. Rhode Island visits Temple that same Saturday, and Towson faces Navy.

The early nonconference slate spreads across the final days of August as well. Campbell opens on the road at East Tennessee State on Aug. 29, the same day Monmouth travels to Tennessee Tech and Morgan State visits North Carolina A&T. Campbell's home opener follows on Sept. 5 against Western Carolina. North Carolina A&T will also face in-state rival North Carolina Central on Sept. 12, a game that carries the kind of regional weight no guarantee check can replicate.

Elon's nonconference travel includes a trip to Stanford, one of the more unusual road assignments for an FCS program in recent memory. The Phoenix also appear on the Sept. 5 schedule at Davidson, suggesting they carry multiple high-profile nonconference commitments before conference play settles in.

The 2026 CAA will operate with 13 football-playing members after the latest round of realignment reshuffled the conference's makeup. Villanova and William and Mary are departing for the Patriot League, while Sacred Heart, which has been competing as an FCS independent, joins the CAA next fall. The conference's complete membership includes Bryant, Campbell, Elon, Hampton, Maine, Monmouth, New Hampshire, North Carolina A&T, Rhode Island, Sacred Heart, Stony Brook, Towson, and UAlbany.

Each team will play an eight-game conference schedule, split evenly between four home and four road games. According to the CAA's stated scheduling priorities, geography drove much of the construction: pairing teams within the same region, preserving rivalries, and limiting air travel to control costs were all explicit considerations. The release unveiled 24 previously unannounced nonconference matchups alongside the full conference slate.

The payout games carry particular weight for a conference that has consistently punched above its weight in the FCS postseason. Three CAA programs earned playoff berths in 2025, the 18th time in the past 20 years the conference placed at least three teams in the field. The CAA has sent at least one program to the FCS semifinals in 10 of the last 12 seasons and has reached the national championship game 11 times since 2003.

That postseason pedigree makes the nonconference schedule more than a revenue exercise. The FBS matchups sharpen rosters before November, when the conference race tightens and the CAA's playoff positioning gets sorted out through late-season meetings like New Hampshire at Maine on Nov. 21 and Campbell at Elon on Nov. 14.