I am not sure if this is new or not, but when I opened Minecraft Today, I noticed that ijah thingy said "Bungeecord 1.8.x, 1.9" Is this new?
When I saw this, I tried connecting to the server while playing the Minecraft version of 1.9. This did not work, and I got a message similar to this one: "Kick whilst connecting. You are trying to connect to this server using an outdated client. This server uses the 1.8.8 Minecraft version." If you are asking if we can connect via 1.9, that is a no. I don't know why it appeared the way it did for you though.
Not yet anyway The reason you saw this is because the latest version of BungeeCord supports 1.9 and 1.8 but it will send you to different servers. E.g 1.8 players will be sent to "server1" which runs 1.8 and 1.9 players would be sent to "server2" which runs 1.9. The server likely just updated their Bungeecord version.
Oh, thanks. But for the protocol hack there isn't any yet, but there are some plugins that support both I believe.