We were not in the same category as D1A back then.We were only ranked that year because we were undefeated. We were not full funded scholarship-wise, or program support-wise. We played in a 20,000 seat stadium, and played similar schools to us back then...including UCONN.
Yes, we offered some scholarships, but so did UCONN then. Does that mean you were also D1? Did you see the schedule we played that year? Every team was a D1AA team, even though they were not called D1AA back then.
mainly because there was no D1A back then. Rutgers, Temple, BC, were sort of like Ohio, Central Michigan, Northern Iowa are today. They were "university division" programs while UConn was "college division." The Ivies were also University Division at the time. Generally speaking the differences were in number of scholarships, facilities but they weren't as big as they are today, at least in this part of the country. For UConn, UMass and the rest of the old Yankee Conference, our "Big" games were an Ivy opponent and usually a lower level "university" level program. For us it was often Rutgers or Temple. For UMass it was BC, Buffalo, sometimes Rutgers. As I said the lines weren't anywhere near as tightly drawn at that time. In the late 60's-70s, the Yankee Conference capped scholarships at 12, in theory 1 for each starter and a kicker was how they arrived at the number, for example. Holy Cross and Temple, who played schedules similar to what Rutgers played, had more as did BC. If you look at those schedules from say 1960-70, they are pretty similar, especially Holy Cross, Rutgers and Temple--a couple of Ivies, a couple of "eastern powers" (i.e. Penn State, Syracuse,Pitt, West Virginia, Army, Navy), a couple of Yankee conference types, and a couple of other locals like Lehigh, Colgate, BU, and each other. BC tended to play more Catholics in those days rather than what are now Patriot League schools. So they played Detroit, Villanova, Marquette before those schools dropped football. Afterwards they replaced them with a bunch of Virginia schools like Richmond, William & Mary and of all places VMI who they played regularly between the late 60s and early 70s.