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Originally Posted by BishopMVP
You sure it was the BCS auto-bid and not the NCAA auto-bid? I don't see why having non-football playing members would matter for football reasons. In lacrosse the Big East didn't get any credit because all the schools play together in other sports.
A separation of the two conferences would have forced one group (presumably the breakaway football teams) to form a new conference, thus they would have lost their auto-bid in basketball and all the other non-revenue sports. But there are no auto-bids anywhere in football, and the BCS criteria and championships are a separate entity from the NCAA.
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Here's what it says on wikipedia:
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Additional meetings of the football conference members occurred between July and October 2003. In the course of those meetings it was realized that the break-up scenario would not be feasible because the new football conference would lose its automatic NCAA basketball tournament berth and possibly its BCS bid, as well as the Big East name. Further, the football schools had not been together long enough to satisfy certain NCAA rules.
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So I guess the worry was merely "possibly" losing the BCS bid if they split. Unfortunately there's nothing cited to clarify exactly why they were worried about that, but it does seem to imply that the Big East believed there was possibly a tie between splitting from the BBall schools and losing the BCS bid, which is what I remembered being talked about as well.