HuskyHawk
The triumphant return of the Blues Brothers.
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Well, this is the part where I jokingly lecture you about trusting wiki as a source (ha ha). But in seriousness, I get your point. It's not necessarily a contradiction because often the NCAA publishes member lists based on full membership, not statistical qualification. So beware assuming it's a contradiction as much as a difference in which criteria the publication is using at the time.
For transitions between divisions, the process is 3-5 years. Although schools are often playing a compliant schedule in year two, those reclassification cycles don't *require* a compliant schedule until year three at which time they count for statistical purposes (aside from records broken). But schools have the option to elect to be counted as soon as they're compliant with scheduling.
The transition between subdivisions, however, is a two-year process and I believe schools are required to be compliant in year two. So I don't see why they wouldn't count for statistical purposes. I know all the schools recently that have made that same transition have started counting in the second season (UMass, Georgia State, UTSA, etc.) I believe that standard has been around a while. I don't know, it's possible some of the documentation contains an error, but I'm fairly certain they were statistically counted toward Division I-A in 2001.
If you're interested, here is the NCAA's policy from its statistics policies guide (page 26). Unfortunately it's not real clear about FBS to FCS reclassifying.
Who cares? The reality is that we were not as bad as some reported. End of story. In fact, as the first and last team to jump from 1AA to a BCS conference, we exceeded every reasonable expectation.