(01-24-2017 08:36 PM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  As much as I would enjoy an FBS MVFC I am highly skeptical that this is what they have in my mind. Many feel that it would be an incredible stretch to inteprete that the WAC has a mandate to sponsor FBS let alone a conference that sponsored FBS a few decades ago and technically have FB administered as a separate league.

The former may seem incredible, but it was a rule written to allow the WAC to promote schools to FBS even if it had technically lost its status of qualifying as an FBS conference, and since it has not been amended (at least, not yet), it is quite possible that it gets interpreted to mean what it seems like it means. There is a lot of people who have invested lots of political capital in various NCAA rules, and so there is a lot of institutional support for interpreting NCAA rules to mean what they say in a legalistic sense.

But it is riding on a strict interpretation of the rules, and there are not just one, but two ways that the MVFC seems like it cannot possibly qualify as a "former FBS conference":
* first, that the MVFC is not the MVC, and it was started playing I-AA football under Gateway conference auspices in 1985, with the MVFC just being a name change; and,
* second, the rule says former FBS, not former I-A ... which may seem like a technicality, but the whole "WAC loophole" story is a technicality, an option that was created for a temporary emergency situation which was never closed off, after it turned out the WAC could not work out how to use the option to recover their FBS status.