Joe Raymond / AP

Even if Notre Dame struggles under new coach Charlie Weis, the Irish are reportedly guaranteed at least $1 million a year from the BCS under a new arrangement.

Other standards were set to allow teams from outside the BCS conferences to qualify automatically, but not until last year when Utah earned a spot in the Fiesta Bowl had a team from outside one of the big six conferences played in the BCS.

The BCS also decided to expand to five games last year. Starting with the 2006 season, 10 teams will qualify for the BCS, with the top two meeting in a newly created championship game to be played a week after the four major bowls.

The addition of another game and the new evaluation process for automatic entry were prompted by protests from the five lower-revenue conferences — such as the Mountain West, where Utah plays, and Conference USA — that the BCS was unfairly shutting out dozens of schools.

Of the original six BCS conferences, the Big East would appear to be most affected by the changes. The league lost Miami and Virginia Tech last season to the ACC; Boston College follows this year. However, the addition of Louisville this year, along with South Florida and Cincinnati, should help the Big East’s chances of keeping its elite status.

Weiberg said Louisville, which finished 10th in the BCS standings last year while playing in C-USA, will be included in the Big East’s evaluation and should help the league retain its bid.

“The reason for that is that we’re trying to get an assessment looking forward of the prospective strength of the conference, even though it will be based on past performance,” Weiberg said.

The proposal and others developed in Phoenix are subject to review by an 11-person committee formed by university presidents. Weiberg said that would be done in a teleconference call on May 12.

He said the athletic directors who met in Phoenix will do more teleconferencing and possibly have one more meeting to fine-tune proposals — especially the makeup of the replacement poll to take the place of The AP poll in the new BCS standings formula — before the Collegiate Commissioners Association meetings in Denver on June 20.

The new poll will not be unveiled until June at the earliest.

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