The East Tennessee State Buccaneers football program is the intercollegiate American football team for East Tennessee State University. The team was dormant from the end of the 2003 season until being reinstated for the 2015 season. Before ETSU dropped football, it competed in NCAA Division I as a Southern Conference (SoCon) football program. The revived program played as an independent in 2015 before returning to the SoCon in 2016. The Buccaneers have won five conference championships, with one coming in the Smoky Mountain Conference, two in the Ohio Valley Conference and two in the Southern Conference. The Buccaneers have appeared in the I-AA/FCS playoffs three times.