Aresco lauds AAC schools’ teamwork
During a brief, calm moment following a chaotic few weeks, Mike Aresco took a walk in downtown Providence Saturday. The American Athletic Conference commissioner then returned to the league offices to catch a full slate of football games.
Nearly three weeks after a pair of hurricanes devastated Houston and Florida, much of the college football world is getting back to normal. That includes the AAC, which was forced to cancel several games in anticipation of the deadly storms that affected UCF, USF, Houston, Memphis and UConn.
Officials began the arduous task of trying to reconfigure the league’s schedule two weeks into the season with the hopes of guaranteeing every team would play a full eight-game conference schedule.
Five days later, after countless hours and hundreds of phone calls, the AAC released a revised schedule.
“I think it’s one of the seminal moments of the brief history of our conference,” Aresco said. “We really showed the kind of cohesiveness that a true conference really is.
“I felt really strongly that the conference games were important. If we lose a nonconference game here or there, it’s not good but it’s still better than losing a conference game.”
But reconfiguring a conference schedule isn’t as easy as setting your fantasy-football lineup. According to league officials, seven different scheduling models were created and discussed during a five-day period following Irma, each presenting its own set of challenges and potential roadblocks.
“You have bye dates, you have homecomings, you have stadium availability issues and you have charter travel. You have hotel room issues, you have tickets and competitive balance is critical,” Aresco said of the hurdles. “We had some schedules that would have worked, but it meant that somebody would have had to play three road games in a row or four road games in a row. We tried to make this as competitively even and fair as possible under the circumstances.”
There was the concern COMMENTARY that if everyone didn’t play a full eight-game league schedule, the conference’s tie-breaker based on winning percentage would wind up being unfair if one team played seven games and another played eight.
“You were potentially going to have four teams with one fewer conference game,” Aresco said.
Luckily for Aresco and the American, that won’t happen because officials managed to reconfigure the league schedule, including this week’s UCF home matchup against Memphis.
But every plan included some sacrifices.
Games with three nonconference opponents were dropped altogether, including Maine (UCF), UMass (USF) and Georgia State (Memphis). Aresco said the league will take care of the costs associated with the buyouts for each of those games with a combination of insurance and reserve funds.
“We’ll figure it out. And also if there are any ancillary costs, we’ll pick those up as a conference. We’re not going to ask the schools to do that; they’ve done enough,” he said.
But the plan could have fallen apart if everyone wasn’t on board with the changes.
“I wasn’t going to force anything on anyone. That’s not the way we do business,” Aresco said.
Along those lines, he said the league spoke with athletics directors individually during the process rather than on a conference call, making sure what was being done was right for each school.
“But they came together and they did what was best for the greater good of the conference to get these two games scheduled,” Aresco said. “I could not be prouder of them.”