Team News - 2024 WCU Football Schedule

Here are some comment's on this season's schedule:

In early April, Mercyhurst announced that it was transitioning to Division 1 and joining the Northeast Conference effective at the end of the 2023-2024 academic season. As a result, West Chester, which was scheduled to face the Lakers in the last week of the season, has only ten games on the schedule. More on that later.

With the exception of homecoming, all home home games will have a noon kickoff.

The Golden Rams will face two teams that qualified for the Division II playoffs last season: East Stroudsburg and PSAC champions Kutztown, which advanced to the national semi-finals. The Golden Bears appear in a couple of preseason top-ten lists.

The season-opening matchup against Bentley could be telling for WCU's season. West Chester has faced the Falcons in each of the past seven seasons and holds a 6-1 record during that span. The Golden Rams won handily in 2017 and 2018 and qualified for the playoffs as the fifth and third seed in the region respectively. In 2019, West Chester needed a late game miraculous comeback to take the win and managed to qualify for the postseason as the sixth seed. Since then, Bentley scored a 24-point victory in 2021 while West Chester squeezed out one-point wins in the past two seasons, and the Golden Rams finished 6-5, 7-4, and 6-5. A big win in the opener may mean playoffs, while a close win or a loss may mean a .500 season.

Back to the predicament of the ten-game schedule. In January, the NCAA approved a proposal to allow for a "week 0" to be played in Division II football, although teams are still only permitted to play a maximum of 11 games during the regular season. This provides schools some flexibility in their non-conference scheduling. For example, East Stroudsburg and Edinboro took their game originally scheduled for September 21 and moved it to August 29. As a result, East Stroudsburg is taking a bye on September 21, while Edinboro did some additional shuffling with Bloomsburg (both teams were scheduled to play Mercyhurst this season) and now has a bye on October 15.

So why doesn't West Chester just find an opponent for week 0 then? Well the PSAC schedule for the final week of the regular season, which is when the Golden Rams were set to face Mercyhurst, has a minor quirk to it. On the final week of the PSAC regular season, the top team in each division play each other for the PSAC championship. If West Chester were to play a game in week 0 and go on to win the PSAC East, they would have 12 games which eclipses the Division II maximum. So a week 0 game is not a viable option.

Since any game in the final week of the regular season i.e. November 16, needs to be provisional, the risk of potentially not playing that game could be shared with another school that may also only be available provisionally as well. The Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association has a similar championship format to that of the PSAC - the division winners play each other for the conference championship - however, unlike the PSAC, the other CIAA teams in the conference do not play that week. West Chester should contact Bowie State and schedule a game on the final week of the regular season as long as neither team qualifies for their respective conference championship game. Besides being a fresh face, the Bulldogs are a quality opponent which qualified for the playoffs in five of the past eight seasons. And they are close enough to make same-day travel reasonable which is easier on the budget than a trip to Erie.

Day	Date	Opponent	Time	Notes
Saturday	September 7	vs Bentley	12:00 pm
Saturday	September 14	vs California	12:00 pm
Saturday	September 21	at Seton Hill	12:00 pm
Saturday	September 28	at Bloomsburg	2:00 pm
Saturday	October 5	vs Shippensburg	12:00 pm
Saturday	October 12	vs Shepherd	12:00 pm
Saturday	October 19	at East Stroudsburg	6:05 pm	East Stroudsburg's Homecoming
Saturday	October 26	vs Millersville	2:00 pm	Homecoming/Family Weekend
Saturday	November 2	vs Lock Haven	12:00 pm	Senior Day
Saturday	November 9	at Kutztown	12:00 pm	Kutztown Senior Day