D1AA Ranked Games More Fun Than a Submarine Filled with Snacks

09.18.2026College Men

Kentucky vs Texas A&M 2025 Playoffs Ph Will Fagan

Texas A&M celebrates in the 2025 NCR D1AA playoffs. Photo Will Fagan

Author: Alex Goff

For those of us at Goff Rugby Report World Headquarters, few things are more exciting than when the snack submarine shows up with delicacies from around the world, and one of those things is the D1AA rankings.

Why? Well, the main reason is that we don't mix the divisions elsewhere and we do here. So CRAA D1A teams and NCR D1AA teams get ranked together.

That makes some of the crossover games between the two groups much more interesting.

Men D1AA Rankings 2026-27 Week 4

This weekend is a bit weird because we have a lot of Friday night matchups. Part of that could be trying to avoid the football crush that those college campuses encounter. We also don't see a huge number of high-ranked vs high-ranked.

Notable games, however, include our #1, Louisville, against D1 team Wisconsin in Cottage Grove. This is a Friday game that should be a solid test for the Cardinals, but since the Badgers already lost fairly convincingly to Iowa, the pressure is on Louisville to follow suit.

Our #6, Bowling Green, will take on Michigan in Ann Arbor on Friday night. This is another matchup between a MAC D1AA team and a Big 10 D1 team. For the Big 10 teams, these are warmups to be sure, while for the MAC teams they are definitely measuring sticks. Teams with championship aspirations are scheduling these types of fixtures.

In the new Great Plains Conference in NCR, which is made up of former Heart of America (CRAA) teams that switched to NCR, the chase is on to see who is tops there. Kansas vs Oklahoma is a very good starting point. The other question for them is, how will they match up nationally? Winning a new conference is one thing; winning against teams from other conferences something else entirely.

Iona vs Babson (#17 at #9) is a good Liberty litmus test, and we're interested also in UMass vs UConn. In the SCRC, Kentucky (#4) will be a difficult neutral-site opponent for an LSU team that was humbled a bit last week.

And as to that game, here's the crossover match we're interested in, with Loyola of New Orleans playing Texas A&M. The Aggies come in with new Head Coach Jake MIzell, fresh off an assistant stint at West Point.

Loyola is a new program, having played their first game every last week under Head Coach Taylor Howden.

It's a playoff NCR team (TAMU), ranked #5 by GRR, against a new school-supported CRAA Independent team ranked #16. At GRR we think Loyola could easily be ranked higher, but they're only played the one game. This matchup will tell us a lot.

Loyola New Orleans Opens Account With Impressive Victory

Don't forget that you can track results at the top of every page, and you can filter the results by tapping Matches and then using the drop-downs. Here's the link for all D1AA matches.