UMass football is moving ahead with scheduling its first few years without a conference. The school will lose its affiliation with the Mid-Atlantic Conference after next season.

UMass football will play as an independent, at least for the 2016 and 2017 seasons. To exist without a conference, the university’s athletic director John McCutcheon says long-term planning is essential. Yesterday he announced the Minutemen had already found opponents for nine games of its 12 game schedule in each for those two seasons. But McCutcheon says the program is still actively looking to join a conference in a few years.

“I don’t think it’s a question of if, I just think it’s a question of when,” says McCutcheon. “We are attractive on a number of different levels, not only with football, but with many of our programs.”

McCutcheon says only two other schools in the country run football programs outside of the conference system — Army and Brigham Young University. UMass has scheduled four games each with those schools, all the way out to the football season in 2022.