Will American Athletic Conference’s Expansion Gamble Work For TV?

In the wake of losing arguably its top three members — Cincinnati, Houston and UCF — to the Big 12, the American Athletic Conference (AAC) was at a crossroads. Expansion was essential to grow from eight remaining members, but the schools it chose to expand with were critical to the league remaining competitive financially.

The AAC’s first choice was to expand west, with some combination of Air Force, Boise State, Colorado State and San Diego State, but those schools opted to stay in their current home, the more-regionally focused Mountain West. This was the more modern approach to conference expansion. You can push the borders of your league beyond your existing footprint if additions are either a cultural fit or expand the TV reach and interest. Air Force is a national brand. Boise and SDSU are football programs with national attention every year.

But without that option available, the AAC gambled instead, with a throwback to the 2010-14 style of conference expansion: Adding schools largely for the TV market they’re located in.

Last week, the league announced it would add six schools, to grow its ranks to 14 (Navy is an affiliate member in football, while Wichita State is all other sports). Charlotte, Florida Atlantic, North Texas, Rice, UAB and UTSA would come aboard to expand the league’s footprint in the South (and especially Texas), add big TV markets, increase access to major football recruiting hotbeds, and at least try and replace what it loses without Cincinnati, Houston and UCF.

After signing a 12-year, $1 billion deal with ESPN back in 2019, the AAC is not in a place where they’re up for a new TV rights contract — and that’s a good thing for the conference. But some of the value of that deal had come from the brands of the three latest departures, along with Connecticut, who also left after that deal was signed (and in part, because it was signed). The AAC probably isn’t looking to renegotiate, even with more game inventory (14 football teams now vs. 11 last season). Yet, if ESPN wanted, it would be simple to argue that the value of the member schools — particularly as football brand names — just doesn’t stack up the way it used to.

Each week, VIZIO’s Inscape publishes the 30 most-viewed college football games of the weekend, and there’s been no sign of any of the six new AAC schools since at least week five on that list. Granted, it’s not counting ESPN+ among those totals. But that’s sort of the point, no? To stay competitive and relevant (both on and off the field), the AAC needed to add schools that moved the needle for TV. To-date, if ESPN’s pushing college football games to ESPN+, that usually means that the games (and teams involved) don’t.

This isn’t a way to diminish the six new schools, either. Credit to them — several of whom are newer additions to college football’s top division — for putting themselves in this position. But with minimal success on the field between them (only a handful of conference titles in the last decade, partly contested between one another), this seems like a move entrenched in market appeal and the potential of success, rather than near-even replacements.

The AAC isn’t even the first league to try this in recent memory. After the last round of widespread conference realignment in Division I athletics, Conference USA (the current home of the AAC’s new additions) opted for large markets when it backfilled membership. The Sun Belt conference added established football programs, in large part, even if it was at the level below. It was still considered inferior to C-USA at the time because the expansion game was based on markets most of all (how else do you think Rutgers made its way into the Big Ten despite a largely moribund football program throughout its existence?).

Fast-forward less than a decade, though, and C-USA is about to lose three members (Marshall, Old Dominion, Southern Miss) to the Sun Belt, and will be down to just five schools. The Sun Belt, meanwhile, will likely add on FCS power James Madison to make it 14 members along with those three Conference USA additions. That league is now not just in a stronger place on the field. But also a stronger place when it comes to negotiating its media rights.

While the Sun Belt still lags behind the AAC, that’s not the debate here. And you could argue that the Sun Belt’s actually closed some of the gap with the AAC (largely seen as the top non-power conference in college sports) over the last month. That’s no small feat.

But expansion rules have always changed with the times, so who knows how long the current rules around who’s going to watch actually last. Before this, it was TV markets. Before that, on-field success. And before that, culture fit was probably more critical as schools were bunched into more, but smaller conference groupings aligning with athletic and institutional priorities.

The AAC’s approach isn’t doomed to fail. And operating from a place of having quality programs still at the top (Memphis, SMU, Tulane, Navy, etc.), they’ll likely be alright on the field. But when you put the value of this TV deal under the microscope a few years down the road, it’ll be interesting to see if the league has been able to make itself more visible or less on TV compared to peer conferences, and what the repercussions look like if the answer’s the latter.