Interesting…thought the segment I used down below was something to think about. Surprised he even brought up contraction and I wonder if it’s been a thought at those levels.
CBS Sports:If you keep your championship game with 11 schools, you’d most likely have to get a waiver from the NCAA. How do you approach that?
Aresco: "There are three arguments about getting either a waiver or legislation: One, a conference should be able to determine its champion any way it wants. Two, why would you encourage us to go back to 12 and essentially raid another conference? Third, why would you force us to contract to 10 [to play a round-robin conference schedule]?
“Give us the waiver or pass legislation. We’ve been talking to the Big Ten. They did it [played with 11 members] for 20 years. … We could play a championship game with our top two teams like the Big 12 … I think we could get that – have more games between UCF and Memphis and UCF and Houston.”
“I would think we’ll have a pretty good idea where we’re headed with conference membership by media day and how we want to structure football,” Aresco said.
One topic up for discussion is whether to explore adding new schools or staying with 11 teams.
“We’ll consider a 12th school, but unless that school helps our strength and really enhances our brand why would you do it?” Aresco said. “We’re not going to do anything that dilutes the brand and diminishes us at all.”
Those other schools in the conference should be happy they are in the AAC and getting paid $7M. If they don’t like it, they can go to the Sunbelt conference.
We suck but we still get $7M may resonate with admin people but not players and recruits. If the commissioner disrespects 8 of the 11, that should provide some motivation for the 8. It would for me at least.
I wonder how long Fritz will be at Tulane. If he can make that a winning team he will be in high demand. He was my choice to succeed Herman, but LTH stayed a year too long and Tulane snatched him up.
SMU has so much potential… they’re located in Dallas (Big city) play in a relatively big market and have access to Texas recruits and some sort of history and rivalry in UH.
I wish they could get good so we could have an actual local rival in the conference. It would only help the conference.
Tulsa is regressing. Within the last year it has reduced salaries of coaches and AD.
On the academic side it has eliminated many majors. Students were in some of those.
