The universities that replaced them were Louisville, South Florida and Cincinnati from Conference USA. The league also invited the University of Connecticut to play football a year earlier than planned. At about this time, the BCS announced that it would adjust the automatic bids granted to its six founding conferences based on results from 2004 to 2007, and that there would be five, six, or seven such bids starting in 2008. The obvious inference was that soon the Big East might lose its bid.