Division III head coach calls out NESCAC for instituting roster limits for football only, forcing mandated cuts to deserving players

Dan DiCenzo has spent his entire career inside the NESCAC, and now he is publicly pushing back on the one rule that sets the conference apart from the rest of Division III football.

The Wesleyan (D-III - CT) head coach took to X to call out the NESCAC's roster limits, the cap that forces its member programs to cut players every spring and summer. The presidents of the conference have mandated an 84-man roster for fall football, a conference-wide restriction that no other Division III league is known to impose. Teams carrying more than that have to trim down to the ceiling before the season starts.

This fall marks the first season NESCAC teams are eligible for the NCAA Division III playoffs, ending a long stretch in which the league sat out the national tournament by choice. The conference champion earns an automatic bid, and other NESCAC teams can now land at-large spots in the 40-team bracket. Programs finally get to chase a national title, and they are being told to send players home to do it.

Football is the lone NESCAC sport subject to a conference-wide mandatory limit, while the other 22 sports let individual schools set their own roster sizes. A player-led petition to remove the limits argues football ranks near the bottom of the conference in roster disparity, which makes singling it out tough to make sense of.

The math is just part of the problem, there's also the basic human element of it that gets ignored. An 84-man roster in a physical fall sport means depth disappears fast once injuries hit, and it means telling walk-ons and developmental players who did nothing wrong that there is no spot for them. The petition backing his position says the rule pushes more than 20 athletes off each roster.

The league pointed at large rosters being an unfair advantage, but as he points out in the provided clip below, there's one track team in the league with 16 individuals on it, and another with 66 - yet football is the only sport in the NESCAC that was hit with roster limits.

DiCenzo knows the league as well as anyone coaching in it. He played strong safety at Williams, earned First-team All-NESCAC honors, and wrestled for the Ephs before getting into coaching. He made assistant stops at Trinity, Brown, and back at Williams, where he also ran the wrestling program to a 50-16-1 record, before joining Wesleyan as associate head coach and defensive coordinator under Mike Whalen in 2010. He took over the top job in 2015.

Wesleyan won the first outright NESCAC championship in program history in 2024, going 8-1, and followed it with a 7-2 finish in 2025 that tied for first in the league. DiCenzo owns an impressive 63-25 record as the Cardinals' head coach.

Now one of the conference's most successful coaches is asking why the league is capping its rosters just as the door to the national stage finally opens.

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