To get an autobid you have to have six teams in your conference. I assume that means six teams that are eligible to be in the playoffs.
Jacksonville State is ineligible for the FCS playoffs because they are transitioning to FBS. That leaves the Atlantic Sun with five teams. The reborn WAC only has five eligible teams as Tarleton State is transitioning from D-II to D-1(FCS). There is something called the Atlantic Sun/Western Athletic alliance in which a computer ranks the teams in both conferences and an auto-bid goes to the team that comes out on top of the rankings. That happens to be Eastern Kentucky from the Atlantic Sun.
Ivy League does not play post season football. (Not unique in the Northeast. The teams in the D-III Northeast Small College Athletic Conference don't compete in post season football either.)
Winners of the MEAC and SWAC meet each year in the Celebration Bowl. Their choice, probably more fun in any event.
Don't know about Mercer, but two teams above them from the Southern Conference did get in. Samford is in with a first round bye and Furman is also in.

Final from LMU: UCD 13, UCSD 12 (2OT - but water polo always goes to double OT)

UCD advances to NCAA Men's Water Polo championships to be held in Berkeley the week of November 28 to December 4. The water polo tournament is confusing as there are a series of play-ins before the play-offs.

UCD has the WWPA's sole bid. This will be the final WWPA men's tournaments as both the Big West and the West Coast Conference have announced they will sponsor men's water polo beginning with the 2023-24 school year.

The selections and brackets for this year's championships will be announced on the NCAA website this evening.

Go Ags!

Regarding Cal and coaching prospects: as if the Bears didn't have enough money issues, they are one of the victims of the FTX crypto-currency collapse. Ten year, $17.5M deal evaporates in bankruptcy filing.
https://www.ktvu.com/news/cal-athletics-faces-aftermath-of-cryptos-ftx-collapse

Time to try out for USFL or buy some long johns and head to Canada.

Gardner Webb may be an auto-bid.

Bump! We're only $65.00 short!

Pardon a Sunday morning free-form rant.

I prefer a conference where everyone plays everyone else. Unfortunately we are stuck in this system. How do you get two decent football conferences out of the schools in the Big Sky? As football only members Davis and Cal Poly don't have much say in this. The other schools could make this manageable by kicking us out, and then where do we go?

The Missouri Valley Football Conference is a distinct entitiy from the Missouri Valley Coference for other sports. Can you do that with the Big Sky schools? Where would you find other schools to come up with whatever minimum membership the NCAA requires for an auto-bid?

I thinik there is a weird arrangement with the WAC and the Atlantic Sun, as well as the Ohio Valley and Southland where the combined conferences get an autobid between them. Ivy League does not participate in post season play and the winners of two FCS/HBCU conferences (MEAC and SWAC) meet in an annual bowl rather than compete in the NCAA playoffs.

The fourteen teams in the Big Ten are divided into two divisions for football. Each team plays the other six teams in its division and three teams in the other division for a nine game conference schedule. I have seen seasons where my beloved Hawkeyes play only weak teams in the east, but this year they played both Michigan and An Ohio State. (and sadly have done just well enough in the Big Ten Worst that they may make it to the conference championship and have to play one of those schools again.) It will only get more confusing when the LA schools join.

Cal Poly finished the season on a small up tick, beating Portland State 49-42. Good for them!

I don’t think the policy about conference opponents or opponents from regular season games applies to second round games.

Eleven auto-bids and thirteen at-large. The garbage slots will be the auto-bids from the weaker conferences. I think there’s even some arrangement where two weak conferences, neither of which has the minimum number of teams for such a bid, are combined to allow a single auto-bid between them.

Scheduling favors geography, and tries to avoid first round games between teams in the same conference or which have played each other in the regular season.

I was around the other time we lost to them twice in a season. Not fun.

Football
Them 27, Us 21
Causeway Score: UCD 22.5, CSUS 7.5

Next events are the basketball games on this coming Tuesday, the 22nd.

WWPA Semi-final results:
UCD 12, Santa Clara 7
UCSD 13, LMU10

For what seems like the hundredth straight year the Ags and Tritons will meet for the league tournament championship and a spot in the NCAA tournament.

The Cal victory was nice, but to be honest, Cal is off to a bad start. 0-4 against UCD, Kansas State, UCSD and Southern. They are 0-2 against UCs.

FWIW: I couldn't find anything on the UCD site and went straight to he WWPA website. Even there it took a little bit of navigating and all I found was a list of Day 1 scores and an image of the site's Tweet showing the Day 2 schedule.

Ags easily defeated Fresno Pacific, 22-6, in the first round of the WWPA conference tournament. They will play Santa Clara, a 16-15 double overtime winner over Air Force, in a Saturday semi-final. LMU plays UCSD in the other semi-final.

Early in the season but as of this moment the Kings are 8-6, 8th in the West and the only California team that would be in the playoffs if the season ended as I type this.

I'm in. Thanks for doing the legwork for this.

Go Ags!

Chima is on the roster for both the Sacramento Kings and the Stockton Kings on their respective websites.

"Does Sac rest some players?"

Sac players will probably get a rest in any event. They are almost certain to get a first round bye the following weekend.