NCAA Division I independent schools

As of the upcoming 2020 college football season, there will be seven NCAA Division I FBS independent schools.

Notes

In the 2020 season, four schools will play as FCS independents—Dixie State, Presbyterian, Robert Morris, and Tarleton State. Dixie State announced in January 2019 that it would begin a transition from Division II to the non-football Western Athletic Conference in July 2020, with the football program becoming an FCS independent at that time.[5] Presbyterian announced in 2017 that it had started a transition to non-scholarship FCS football. The Blue Hose played their final season of Big South Conference football in 2019, and will play the 2020 season as an independent before joining the Pioneer Football League, a football-only conference made up entirely of non-scholarship FCS programs, in 2021. Presbyterian will remain a full non-football Big South member.[6] Robert Morris will leave the football-sponsoring Northeast Conference for the non-football Horizon League in July 2020; it will play the 2020 season as an independent and then join Big South football.[7] Tarleton State announced in 2019 that it would join the WAC alongside Dixie State and also play football as an FCS independent.[8]

The only school that had played as an FCS independent in 2019, North Dakota, joins the Missouri Valley Football Conference in 2020. North Dakota left the Big Sky Conference in 2018 to join the non-football Summit League, but agreed to honor existing contracts to play Big Sky members in football, and thus played a full Big Sky football schedule as an FCS independent in 2018 and 2019. While North Dakota was not listed in conference standings, their games against Big Sky football members counted fully in conference standings.[9]

There is currently one NCAA Division I independent in men's ice hockey. The Sun Devils moved up from club hockey in the ACHA to full varsity status. Arizona State began playing a full Division I schedule in 2016–17, and expected to be in a hockey conference for 2017–18, but no conference move has yet materialized.

No women's ice hockey teams played as independents at the National Collegiate level, the de facto equivalent to Division I in that sport, in the 2019–20 season.

Five schools—Franklin Pierce, Post, Sacred Heart, Saint Anselm, and Saint Michael's—competed as independents in the 2018–19 season, all participating in the nascent New England Women's Hockey Alliance (NEWHA), which had originally been established in 2017 as a scheduling alliance among all of the then-current National Collegiate independents. The NEWHA initially included six schools, but Holy Cross left after the inaugural 2017–18 NEWHA season to join Hockey East. The NEWHA officially organized as a conference in advance of the 2018–19 season,[13] but was not officially recognized by the NCAA as a Division I league until the 2019–20 season, by which time the newly launched LIU program had joined to return the conference membership to six.[14]

There are no men's soccer independents as of the 2018 season.

Two schools were independents in the most recently completed 2019 women's soccer season. The most recent departure from the independent ranks was Hampton University, which joined the Big South Conference, which sponsors women's soccer, in 2018.[15]