Other than a handful of teams that managed to play a few games, the 2020 season was a lost one for those below the Football Bowl Subdivision level.

In wiping away the schedule, the virus also scuttled games that had been circled since they were agreed upon. What would have been Fordham’s season opener at Hawaii serves as an example of such.

While the Rams will not be making the 12-hour flight from New York to Honolulu to open the 2021 season, it was announced May 3 that they will travel to Nebraska.

Fordham, which played three spring games, has routinely played Football Bowl Subdivision programs the past decade or so. However, traveling halfway across the country to play a Big Ten team is a big deal for the Patriot League member. After all, it has been 70 years since the Rams last met a Big Ten team on the gridiron.

Fordham has since played teams that are current members of the Big Ten, but a 1941 game against visiting Purdue was their last meeting with a team that was a member of the conference at the time the game was played.

A 17-0 victory over the Boilermakers at the Polo Grounds was part of a memorable year for the Rams, who were coached by Jim Crowley, one of Notre Dame’s famed Four Horsemen of the 1920s. They went 8-1, finished sixth in the AP and defeated Missouri in the Sugar Bowl.

Times certainly have changed and the trip to Lincoln, which reportedly has a $500,000 payout, will mark the Rams’ first outside the Eastern Time Zone since 1995 when they played Holy Cross in Bermuda. They also played Holy Cross in Ireland in 1991.

The last time the Rams played a game in the U.S. outside the Eastern Time Zone was 1983 when the program was at the Division III level and went up against St. Norbert (Wis.) College at Lambeau Field.

The game against the Cornhuskers will be the first west of the Mighty Mississippi since Fordham opened the 1951 season with a 34-20 win at Missouri. (Fordham, which did not sponsor football at the NCAA level from 1955 to 1969, had a club team that traveled to Washington University in St. Louis in 1966.)

While the virus canceled Fordham’s trip to Hawaii last year, it ultimately provided an opportunity to play the Cornhuskers this year.

Nebraska was scheduled to open the season August 28 in Dublin against Illinois. That game, it was announced in February, was moved to Champaign. With no need to take a week off in order to recoup from an 8,000-mile round trip to Ireland, Nebraska found itself with an idle Labor Day weekend that it preferred to fill and to do so at Memorial Stadium.

When Fordham answered the bell for the September 3 matchup, the Cornhuskers scrapped their November 13 date with FCS member Southeast Louisiana and did so at a cost of $600,000, which was the payout for that game. (The schools hope to reschedule in the not-too-distant future.)

The shift in scheduling provides Scott Frost’s team with a mid-November open date between a visit from Ohio State and a trip to Wisconsin.

Fordham at Nebraska is among the many FCS/FBS games on Labor Day weekend. There are three such games, each featuring a team from the Northeast Conference, that are of the landmark variety for the visiting FCS program.

The trip to Miami to play the Panthers will mark LIU’s first game against an FBS opponent. The Sharks then travel to West Virginia and Miami (Ohio) in an ambitious start to 2021 for a program that has had only one season at the FCS level. The game against the Mountaineers has a $475,000 guarantee.

LIU underwent quite a transformation in 2018 when LIU-Post, which was playing football at the Division-II level, and non-football playing LIU-Brooklyn merged athletic departments to become the Long Island University Sharks.

The newly-formed entity elevated to Division I effective the 2019 season and became a member of the NEC. A 0-10 inaugural FCS season was an offensively challenged one as the Sharks scored all of 97 points. After being shut down last fall due to the virus, a season in which they were not scheduled to play an FBS team, the Sharks had a four-game spring season against fellow conference members.

The trip to Ypsilanti will mark the Red Flash’s first game against an FBS opponent. St. Francis, which is in the borough of Loretto, about 80 miles east of Pittsburgh, elevated from Division III to the FCS in 1993 and has been a member of the NEC since 1996. The school first fielded a football team in 1892. The Red Flash reached the FCS playoffs once, losing a first-round game to Villanova in 2016.

The game in Fort Worth will mark the Dukes’ fourth against an FBS team and first versus a Power Five program. The game, of which financial terms were not disclosed because TCU is a private institution, should go down as the largest crowd Duquesne will have played before. Since the program was reinstated at the NCAA level in 1979 following a three-decade hiatus, the highest announced attendance they have played in front of was 26,175 at Hawaii in 2019, their most recent game against an FBS opponent.

The Dukes, who would have opened at Air Force last season, follow their trip to TCU with a game at Ohio University, giving them consecutive dates at FBS schools. They are scheduled to open 2022 at Florida State.