While the Huskies leaving for the Big East Conference diminishes the AAC’s basketball brand, the conference will likely remain at 11 football-member schools because, despite speculation among national media outlets about potential additions on the gridiron, there doesn’t appear to be a school that would agree to join and add value to the league.
Air Force, Army, BYU, Georgia State, UAB and others have been mentioned as potential targets. But while a number of programs could realistically perform at a higher level than UConn on the football field, it’s hard to find a match that could provide enough prestige, ticket sales, marketing and, most importantly, ESPN viewers and subscribers to make sense.
With 11 teams, the AAC could ditch divisions and instead pit the two teams with the highest national ranking at regular season’s end in the conference championship game. That, the source said, would help raise the league’s profile and better position for a college football playoff spot and/or prestigious bowl bids.
Did anyone find it weird that a week or two befoe UCONN news broke, discussions about redoing the best two teams were being discussed, then dismissed??? We were all saying how this did not make sense, then bam!
By doing this you are conceding to the model that allows for total subjectivity and politics to decide who will draw the biggest crowd instead of deciding a championship on the field with the scoreboard. I will never support the CF"P" model. It’s flawed by its very nature. We need 2 divisions and a championship game that is decided with conference records.
So it sounds like ESPN is half-heartedly pushing BYU towards the AAC so as to not have to renegotiate BYU’s TV deal, isn’t approving any other school, and there isn’t much interest from either side.
The problem is that BYU doesn’t want in on the AAC contract (among other things, they would lose their very-important-to-them third tier rights) and the AAC doesn’t want to let them have their own contract.
I wonder if that’s changed. 11 teams is really hard to do divisions for. For example, I’m not sure you can do divisional round-robin with everyone playing the same number of games. (This was at least an issue with 13 in post-us Conference USA.)
I’d still rather do divisions, but if we’re staying at 11 I am guessing we don’t do that.
That’s what I was wondering; hopefully someone knows. I thought that in order to have a championship game, teams have to either play everyone in their division or in their conference. How could that work with a round-robin minus one or unbalanced divisions? The Big 10 had 11 schools for a time but wasn’t able to play a championship game. Hmm … I know the Big 12 got it changed so that conferences without divisions could have a CCG, but I think the rule about playing everyone (in division or conference) is still in effect. If so it’ll be interesting to see what the conference does. The championship game is a showcase for the AAC and also worth some good money. And not playing one would potentially give the MWC champion a stronger argument for the access bowl given the additional game plus SOS boost. I really don’t want to add a Southern Miss or Marshall, but I wonder if the conference will IF it’s necessary to have a CCG?