Making a Power move: AAC has a seat at the table

No. 21 UCF and Houston get a chance this season to show the AAC is one of the nation’s power leagues. getty images

Mike Aresco finally got his wish, sort of. Aresco, the AAC commissioner, has lobbied for years for the league’s inclusion with the other Power Five conferences in the upper tier of college football. With the Pac-12 and Big Ten sitting out this fall because of COVID-19 concerns, the AAC is firmly among the top four along with the ACC, Big 12 and SEC. Even though this not how Aresco wanted to be considered a power conference, the AAC does have a unique opportunity to crash the College Football Playoff party, assuming there is a full season, and rewrite the conference’s place in the hierarchy if one of its teams can make a run. He talked with Sports Business Journal about the current state of the AAC and college football.

You’re known for being a loud advocate for your teams and pointing out the perceived bias against the AAC, but it seems like you’ve been much more reserved in the run-up to the season. Is that right?

ARESCO: “Yes, it’s definitely on purpose. You know me, I’m a real advocate, I’m a fighter, but I just didn’t feel it was appropriate to campaign the way we had been. I haven’t even talked about rankings. I haven’t talked about virtually any football. And I can tell you that I don’t even think about it most days. Somebody said that we’re going to get better TV windows. I wish that hadn’t happened because obviously that would mean we wouldn’t have had a pandemic. The point all along has been about health and safety for the last five and a half months.”

All that being said, as we sit here, there will be the championship to play for. There will be a playoff. What kind of unique opportunity does this present for The American? 

ARESCO: “No one wanted this from a pandemic, but if we do play, we’ve got five or six really good teams [including No. 20 Cincinnati and No. 21 UCF, the only Group of Five teams in the Top 25, Houston and Memphis], so we expect another strong season. There will be some opportunities for TV that we didn’t have before. We’ll have a little better shot in the rankings than we might have had otherwise. Like I’ve said, though, I’ve just tried to downplay  that.’’

In the whole Power Five discussion, one of the quotes you’re known for is “We should be in that room.” Do you feel like you’re any closer to that than before?

ARESCO: “We think that we’ve had some influence. With our conference now being essentially the fourth power conference this season, with the ACC, SEC and Big 12, we’ve gotten more attention. But as I said all along, I would like to have been in the room with the Autonomy Five because I think we could have made a real contribution. We have had dialogue with them and our doctors have had dialogue with theirs. We’ve gone out of our way to try to have that dialogue, but you know, we’re not in the room. And I think if we’re in the room, we can share a lot of the insights that our people have. I’ve acutely realized that we need to be in that group to have a voice. Still, almost every article talks about the three conferences that are playing. And so, it’s been driven home that we’re not as relevant in the public debate as we should be.”

Anything that could have been done differently?

ARESCO: “I think a lot of the conversations, frankly, should have been FBS conversations with all 10 conferences involved. We’ve had some of that over the last, I don’t know, maybe six weeks. We’ve had pretty much a weekly call with all the commissioners. And I appreciate that. But when you’re not in the room, it has an impact.”