NCAA Division I FBS independent schools
four-year institutions whose football programs are not part of an NCAA-affiliated conference
National Collegiate Athletic Association Football Bowl Subdivision independent schools are four-year institutions whose football programs are not part of an NCAA-affiliated conference. This means that FBS independents are not required to schedule each other for competition like conference schools do.
There are fewer independent schools than in years past; many independent schools join, or attempt to join, established conferences. The main reasons to join a conference are to gain a share of television revenue and access to bowl games that agree to take teams from certain conferences, and to help deal with otherwise potentially difficult challenges in scheduling opponents to play throughout the season.
All Division I FBS independents are eligible for the College Football Playoff (CFP), and are currently eligible to receive a bye to the quarterfinals of the playoff after automatic bids for the top ranked conference champions were removed following the 2024 season.
Independents historically had eligibility for the so-called "access bowls" (the New Year's Six bowls that issue at-large bids: Cotton, Peach, and Fiesta), if they were chosen by the CFP selection committee. Notre Dame also had a potential tie-in with the Orange Bowl, along with other bowls via its affiliation with the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC). Historically, Notre Dame had similar agreements with its previous conference, the Big East.
The ranks of football independents increased by one starting with the 2011 season with the announcement that BYU would leave the Mountain West Conference (MW) to become a football independent starting with that season. The ranks increased by two in 2013 when the Western Athletic Conference (WAC) dropped football and New Mexico State and Idaho did not have a conference for football.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “NCAA Division I FBS independent schools” as four-year institutions whose football programs are not part of an NCAA-affiliated conference. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as four-year institutions whose football programs are not part of an NCAA-affiliated conference. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3150658. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2024, 2011 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “NCAA Division I FBS independent schools” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.