Prior to the season, the Gateway Collegiate Athletic Conference, otherwise a women's sports league but sponsoring football as its only men's sport since the 1985 collapse of the football side of the Missouri Valley Conference (MVC), merged into the MVC. The football league became the standalone Gateway Football Conference, forerunner of the present-day Missouri Valley Football Conference (MVFC).
Only the top four teams in the field were seeded, and thus assured of home games in their first-round games.[3] The site of the title game, Marshall University Stadium, had been predetermined months before the playoffs began.[4]