Hi, and welcome to Random Take Thursday, something I hope many of you participate in. I thought that Thursday might be a good day to encourage us commenters to post our own pieces on here, giving our opinions on whatever USF-related topic we want. If you want to participate, then just write and post a Fanpost today or next Thursday. If someone else does before you, no big deal, we can have more than one.
So, for Random Take Thursday, I've decided to return to one of my favorite topics, and one we're discussing this week: Conference realignment. In particular, I want to argue why the American Athletic Conference is a better place than the Big Twelve. Now, I know that most of you will doubt this, but hear me out.
The Big Twelve has pretty much no stability. If Texas and Oklahoma leave, it's just AAC caliber schools, but with worse travel for us, as several current conference rivals are closer than West Virginia or Baylor. That's only an upgrade for USF's travel agent.
Furthermore, you have to think longer than just a couple seasons. The Big Twelve has two established powers (who might leave at any time, mind you, especially if revenue for them drops). They also have a couple of up and coming powers in Baylor and TCU. A couple more schools are average powers, and the rest is pretty dead weight. You might salivate about USF vs. Texas. But how about USF vs. Kansas? Yeah, me either.
The AAC, however, has lots of up and coming schools -- like Memphis, Houston, Navy, Temple, and us. Until last season UCF would have been on that list, too. Right now, the American is clearly the coming conference. We are in a position to all but own the Group of Five bid to the New Year's Six bowls, and if we do that, we can make a play for Power Five status -- and bring twelve schools to the party, not just two or four.
Mind you, the past can matter some too. We have established ties and series with much of the AAC, dating back to Big East and even Conference USA days. We've risen together. We know and hate each other. USF vs. Kansas is not merely a matchup that TV is not calling for. Fans of neither school are likely to be interested either.
As for the geographical question, the American already has teams in several important areas, including Texas (Houston and SMU) and Oklahoma (Tulsa). We also travel from time to time to New Orleans, Philadelphia, and the Baltimore/Washington area, not to mention Cincinnati and Memphis. Oh, and know how UConn keeps touting how they're in both the Boston and New York City markets whenever they claim they're the only logical choice to be added by (insert conference they want to join here)? I'm pretty sure that we've got as good if not better markets in our current conference than what the Big Twelve can offer.
Also, remember how the Big East was a BCS conference when we joined, and then lots of teams left and what was left became a Group of Five conference? I wouldn't expect a Big Twelve without Texas and Oklahoma to retain its automatic qualifying status for the New Year's Six bowls for long.
If Oklahoma and Texas remain, however, things are not rosy. Texas currently tends to dominate the conference. It was this perceived imbalance of power that led Nebraska, Missouri, and Texas A&M to leave. If we join, we are likely to have little influence, and therefore little control over our destiny.
In short, I would rather see the Bulls stay in the AAC and help make our current conference great than to join a conference that offers little but the present state of Power Five status.
