The Colonial Athletic Association won’t hold a league title game after all, and James Madison coach Curt Cignetti isn’t a fan of that decision.

“There ought to be a championship game, this year in particular,” Cignetti said. “I can’t figure out why anybody wouldn’t want to have a championship game, and it seems sometimes like the bottom teams in the conference are holding the top teams in the conference back at times on certain issues.

“But we’ll control our business and if you take care of business every Saturday, you don’t have to worry about the automatic qualifier.”

On Wednesday, the CAA announced its plan for a spring football schedule.

The conference will be split into two divisions – North and South – and teams are set to play a six-game CAA schedule with all league contests coming against divisional members. With six schools in each division, teams will play one game against four divisional foes and a home-and-home with one divisional opponent, CAA associate commissioner for communications Rob Washburn confirmed to the Daily News-Record.

Cignetti said he doesn’t mind playing an opponent twice in the same season.

“They do it in the NFL every single year, so there’s no reason you can’t do it in college football,” he said.

The CAA slate will run from March 6 through April 17, with each team getting one bye week during the seven-week window.

The school with the best overall record will earn the league’s automatic qualifying bid to the FCS postseason, and if division champions have identical records at season’s end, the conference will use tiebreakers to determine which one gets into the playoff field automatically. This spring, the FCS playoff bracket will be reduced from the usual 24 selections to 16 choices, and the at-large berths in the tournament are now five instead of the normal 14.

Earlier this month, the DN-R reported that the CAA would split into divisions, and that the league was mulling the idea of having division winners meet in a conference championship game to determine the automatic qualifier.

“One of the factors, while not the only factor, in making that decision was at the time we were contemplating [holding a championship game] and the NCAA hadn’t finalized their maximum number of games parameters yet,” CAA commissioner Joe D’Antonio told the DN-R. “And then when that maximum number of game parameters was finalized with eight games, we then received an interpretation that if you are an FCS conference you are allowed to play a championship game, but you had to count that championship game as one of your eight.

“And it wasn’t the only factor, but it was a factor among our athletic directors in deciding whether or not that was in the best interest of the entire conference because that would’ve prevented a large number of programs from being able to play eight games”

Division alignments and the final conference schedule will be released within the coming weeks, according to Washburn.

With only six league games on the docket, CAA schools may also play up to two non-conference games. D’Antonio said league members could play each other in non-conference meetings, but that they wouldn’t count in the standings.

JMU assistant athletic director for communications Kevin Warner said the school’s goal is to play both non-league games at home. Cignetti said the Dukes are closing in on securing one of the two non-league opponents and are looking for another.

“I think it’s important to have an eight-game season,” Cignetti said. “You never know what can happen during the season if one team can’t play.”

And that’s become an unfortunate reality for schools playing this fall. Cancellations or postponements have occurred 23 times already as a result of positive coronavirus tests or contact tracing.

D’Antonio said the league hasn’t set any virus protocols for spring football yet and is still waiting on testing requirements for the season from the NCAA.

The Atlantic Coast Conference, which shares much of the same geographical footprint as the CAA, is testing its players three times per week.

“The testing piece remains very much a work in progress,” D’Antonio said. “And we, like all other conferences, are working through what the best testing protocols are going to be as it relates to football.”

He said the decision to play six games accounts for safety and other factors the conference considered when determining how many contests it would hold in the spring.

“It was really just the totality of the circumstances and analysis of just taking everything into account,” D’Antonio said. “Safety, travel, finances, what was reasonable to pull off in terms of how the calendar played out. All of those things were factored in terms of getting to the point of six conference games and allowing institutions to try to play the full eight if they could.

“But we’re all excited and hopeful that we have a plan in place of how we want to proceed right now and we’re all aware of the fact that on each of our campuses and within the conference office that there are still protocols we need to adhere to, to make sure we can safely get back on the field. And we’ll continue to work toward those goals as well, but this at least is the first step in taking those steps to get back onto the field.”