American Athletic Conference as Power Conference Isn’t Crazy
During the college football season, the American Athletic Conference was on a campaign to legitimize their league. Using their “Power-6” slogan as their calling card, the AAC just wants to be recognized among the “Power” conferences in the FBS, right next to the ACC, Big Ten, Big-12, Pac-12, and SEC.
Right now, they belong to what is known as the “Group of 5”, a classification that also features the Sun Belt, MAC, Mountain West, and Conference-USA, but is only allotted one guaranteed spot in the New Year’s Six bowl games—with the “Power-5” schools filling the remaining 11 spots.
Now, it’s not crazy by any stretch for the AAC to be considered a notch above the “Group of 5”. After all, before the AAC was a thing, many of the conference’s teams were considered “Power” programs as members of the Big East (UConn, Cincinnati, USF, Temple). Plus, two teams who started out with the AAC in 2013 — Rutgers and Louisville — are now firmly members of Power-5 conferences—Rutgers in the Big Ten, Louisville in the ACC.
None of the other “Group of 5” schools have either distinction.
At the top of the AAC, there’s definitely an argument to be made: Houston, Memphis, Navy, and South Florida have all been nationally ranked multiple times over the last three years and Central Florida, the conference’s pride and joy, was the only team in FBS to finish their season undefeated this year.
The same goes for the middle-of-the-road AAC teams. SMU is a big-time program who was once the best team in college football. They regularly put stars in the NFL, including current studs like Cole Beasley and Emmanuel Sanders. You can say the same thing about UConn, Temple, and Cincinnati — teams that are considered premier programs in basketball and have had legitimate success on the gridiron.
That’s nine real football programs, or 75 percent of the conference.
The other three — Tulane, East Carolina, and Tulane — aren’t great, and I’ll give you that, but you can’t say they’re any worse than Kansas, Maryland, or Illinois—three teams who have all suffered losses of 20 points or more against AAC teams in the last two years.
Adding to that, the AAC continues to prove they can hang with so-called “Power” programs. They currently tote a 4–1 record against the Big Ten and Pac-12 this year and won 10 games against ACC teams during the 2015 and 2016 seasons.
Plus, they’ve handled business in the big games against “Power” teams. Since 2015, they’ve won six of 10 bowl games against Power-5 programs.
While their overall win percentage against the big boys isn’t eye-popping, their record against teams that are supposedly ‘equal’, is eye-popping. Against the Mountain West and MAC, two of the better conferences in the Group of 5, the American Athletic Conference is 14–6 during the same period of time.
Also, if we’re talking ‘power’, doesn’t that allude to size? The AAC has four schools with more than 40,000 students, while the Big-12 has just one and those same two Group of 5 conferences (Mountain West, MAC) have zero. Central Florida, the AAC’s highest-ranked football team, has the biggest enrollment of any school in the country, including all Power-5 conferences.
The whole ordeal puts the AAC in a tough spot: they’re better and have more prestige than the other four “Group of 5” conferences, but are a shade below the “Power-5” from top to bottom. Do I think Tulsa, Tulane, and ECU belong among the likes of Alabama and Michigan? Absolutely not. But do I think programs like Houston, Cincinnati, and UConn deserve a seat? One-hundred percent.
The best case would be for the nine legitimate teams to break free from the three non-legit programs…but I don’t see that happening. In the meantime, it’d be nice for the players to stop getting punished and get bumped up a little rather than pushed downward.