AAC To Become Power Conference?
By: Kenneth Harrison Jr.
TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services
I’ve always loved college football more than professional for a number of reasons.
One of the biggest is because they play much harder. Losing one game can derail the entire season. Unfortunately, college football has always had its share of flaws.
Previously it was almost unheard of for the best teams to play in the national championship. The BCS guaranteed the top two teams would meet but many times it seemed like that was not the case.
Now we have a playoff with four teams coming from the five ‘power’ conferences. I think we need to rethink that because there are some pretty good teams in the ‘Group of Five’ that will never make the playoffs.
Specifically, I think the American Athletic Conference should be added to make the ‘Power Six’ conferences.
You may remember the former Big East, which is the current AAC. During the BCS era they were one of the power conferences. The heavyweight teams like Miami, Virginia Tech, Syracuse and Boston College left the conference.
The second tier institutions like Louisville, West Virginia, Pitt and Rutgers followed suit. As a result, they were very weak because of that and the conference champion would routinely be blown out in the BCS bowl game.
Over the last few years the conference has vastly improved. With schools in Florida, Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania they have a great recruiting base. They are producing NFL talent which casual fans might not be aware of.
One example of that is Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback Blake Bortles. He was picked 3rd overall in the 2014 draft. He led a very good Central Florida team to a 12-1 record in 2013. The Knights beat No. 8 Louisville in the inaugural AAC Championship and No. 5 Baylor in the Fiesta Bowl.
Houston is another program that has had recent success. They were 13-1 in 2011 as members of Conference USA. They beat UCLA and Penn State that year. They finished with that same record in 2015. The Cougars beat Louisville and Vanderbilt during the regular season and No. 9 Florida State in the Peach Bowl. They started the following 2016 season with a victory over No. 5 Oklahoma.
One of the best success stories has to be Temple. The Owls were a charter member of the Big East in 1991 but they were expelled from the league following the 2004 season. They rejoined the conference in 2012 and finally had success. They beat Penn State in 2015 and won the conference championship last year.
Memphis has produced NFL talent like Paxton Lynch, Dontari Poe, Stephen Gostkowski, Akeem Davis and DeAngelo Wiliams.
They shared the conference title in 2014 and in 2015 they upset No. 13 Ole Miss. The Tigers are currently 9-1 including a win over UCLA. They are guaranteed to win the West division and play in the AAC Championship.
UCF (10-0) faces South Florida (9-1) this week and the winner wins the East and advances to the conference championship.
The best thing any of these teams can hope for is a spot in one of the New Year’s Six bowl games. The playoffs should be expanded to at least 6 teams and if that happens the AAC champion should automatically get a playoff spot.
