(10-07-2023 07:36 AM)solohawks Wrote:  

(10-06-2023 08:49 PM)BruceMcF Wrote:  

(10-06-2023 02:15 PM)solohawks Wrote:  ... Auto bids for other sports would seem to be irrelevant. There is not a minimum membership requirement I have heard of her CFP conference status like there is in the NCAA manual. The CFP simply did not plan for something like this, so therefore i don't see how you can just "kick out" the Pac 2 until the next contract cycle in 2 years. But for these last 2 years that PAC conference shell has a pretty iron clad contract. ...

Remember that the payouts do not specify the specific conferences, they are in terms of contract FBS conference and non-contract FBS conferences. IANDL, and I haven't seen the contracts, but it seems quite plausible that if the PAC is no longer officially an FBS contract, the CFP LLC can wriggle out of obligations to the PAC.

But it takes 2 years to officially lose FBS conference status thanks to the waiver period

Read the text of the waiver again. The waiver is not on the number of schools, the waiver is on the schools failing to meet the FBS requirements.

First, an example of the kind of situation the waiver language might have been written for, the conference loses some schools and invites some other schools, but because of a different mix of sports sponsored by the schools falls short on their required number of women sponsored team sport competitions with the six members required for an autobid. It may take a year or two for a schools to start up a program or for a new affiliate to be available when its previous affiliation expires.

But the waiver also covers the situation if a conference has a number of schools leaving and they need to invite up an FCS school to get to their numbers, the waiver gives the forgiveness required when the FCS school is competing as an FBS school but hasn't completed its transition.

Or even, as in the last year of the WAC as an FBS conference, the language of the grace period let's you count one of your non-FB members as one of the eight required FBS members. I am skeptical that this was the intent of the language when it was written. However, at the time a majority of Division 1 clearly did not want to support the process of an airport meeting of a subgroup of a conference being able to easily break away to form a new conference, stranding the rest of the conference without a conference, since they rewrote the continuity rule completely to close off the path that the newly formed MWC took, while simultaneously allowing the WAC to continue as a multi-sport Division 1 conference eligible for a Tourney autobid. So it may well be that some clever bylaw wrangler saw that the black letter of the bylaw allowed the WAC to compete as an FBS conference for one last year as its members sorted out their new homes, by having 7 FBS schools and one non-FB school being the eighth core member which the waiver forgives for not meeting the requirements of being an FBS school (that is, the small detail that an FBS school has to play football ).