Since the advent of the College Football Playoff in 2014, just two AAC programs (Houston and UCF twice) have been the highest rated among all Group of 5 programs, thereby serving as their lone representative in New Year’s Six bowl games. Aresco concedes nailing down an automatic bid is unlikely without expanding the College Football Playoff from six teams to at least eight.
“Yeah, expansion will help, there’s no question,” he said. “(Right now) it’s such a crapshoot. You just never know. You’re competing against four other conferences and we’ve had a couple years where we didn’t make it, but we thought we had the better team. I thought Memphis had the best (Group of 5) team in 2014.”