(07-20-2021 10:46 AM)BruceMcF Wrote:  

(07-20-2021 05:48 AM)Maize Wrote:  

(07-20-2021 05:23 AM)BruceMcF Wrote:  The Big Ten announced an AD agreement that they were abandoning FCS buy games ... and obviously that would have been in part under pressure from or to make themselves more attractive to media partners ... but then walked it back to schools that had four Big Ten home games are allowed to have an FCS buy game.

They also announced a requirement to have 10 P5 games ... but then a certain set of Go5 schools were declared to be "good enough"

The end result was fewer FCS buy games per season, but IIRC not 50% fewer, and the total number of Go5 games buy games ended up not changing all that much.

Fully suspect schools in the American, Mountain West, BYU and Army-(Navy and Air Force are in the AAC & MWC)will all be considered "Good Enough" and will not be left out

Back in 2015, they said that ND, BYU, Army and Navy (which had just joined the AAC at the time of the report) would count, and that UC and UConn would be allowed.

They stated not all of the American schools would count, but Big Ten schools could apply for a school to count and the Big Ten would decide based on their recent RPI "and other factors" (I presume "other factors" is asking the media partner if a school has a big enough brand).

I haven't tracked whether any Big Ten schools have successfully{+} applied for any MWC schools to count, nor for additional AAC schools, since the policy came into effect in 2015. I'm pretty sure that all three with a mandate, the Big Ten, SEC and ACC, count ND, BYU and Army.

{+ One presumes that only successful applications would be announced.}

Ultimately, I think the practical exceptions ended up being over the past few years was that if a Big Ten school had a preexisting home-and-home series scheduled against a non-P5 school, then that would count as a P5 game. The league essentially didn't want to punish schools that already had game contracts in place (particular for road games where they'd have a large financial penalty for canceling).

So, I wouldn't assign any past designation as a permanent exception to any school outside of ND (which is clearly a P5 school despite being an independent in any event).