AAC waiting to set schedule, ready to adapt to fewer games
American Athletic Conference commissioner Mike Aresco said Thursday the league won’t make any decisions about fall sports for a few weeks, but it has developed plans in case the league has to play fewer football games due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The AAC is willing to play the waiting game before finalizing its schedule, much like the SEC, ACC and Big 12.
“We’re aligned with those conferences in terms of wanting to wait at least a couple of weeks before making a decision on whether we delay the season,” Aresco told the Orlando Sentinel. “It’s mainly to determine if we can start on time and under what circumstances.
“Now we also know if some [Autonomy 5] conferences make a certain decision prior to that — we don’t know that they will — that could have an impact on everybody. But right now, those three conferences have basically said they’re going to wait.”
The Big Ten and Pac-12 announced last week they planned a conference-only schedule in football in the fall, leaving other leagues scrambling to fill open slots. The AAC lost five nonconference games against teams from the two leagues.
While the American would prefer to play a 12-game schedule, league officials have prepared several models just in case they have to adjust.
“If we can’t play 12 and we can play 10, our preference would be a hybrid [schedule] with our normal eight conference games and two nonconference games,” Aresco said, citing the importance of several highprofile nonconference matchups including TCUSMU, Army-Navy and USFTexas. “That would be the preference.
“We also have a 10-game allconference schedule draft ready to go if we needed it. If we decide we can’t play nonconference games or we don’t have enough quality nonconference games, then we could pivot to the all-conference schedule, but we prefer not to.”
Aresco said the 10-game hybrid model would go into effect if schools couldn’t play four nonconference games because of decisions from the Power 5 conferences — also known as the Autonomy 5 — or if the start of the season was pushed back.
While the AAC waits for scheduling clarity, the league did take a proactive approach Thursday announcing it would begin testing football players for COVID-19 at least 72 hours before each game during the season.
“We knew there was an announcement coming from the NCAA [and Autonomy 5] about testing protocols and we wanted to get ahead of it,” Aresco said. “We wanted to preempt any notion that we weren’t going to do exactly what they were going to do or have more stringent guidelines. We’re going to meet or exceed the NCAA recommendations.
“We have been hearing through the grapevine that [Group of 5] conferences couldn’t meet these standards and we wanted to preempt that and demolish that notion.”
The testing protocols will apply throughout the regular and bowl seasons, according to Aresco.
Aresco believes the league can turn around the PCR tests quickly despite long wait times around the country.
“The 72 hours gives us enough time and that way if there’s a false-positive, you can do a re-test or if a test gets lost or if a test isn’t considered reliable, you would have some flexibility,” he said.
The schools are responsible for the testing, according to Aresco, but if it becomes too much of a financial burden for some, the AAC is willing to step in and help out. Schools have been paying for the testing as players returned to campus for voluntary workouts.
“It’s not an inexpensive proposition, as you know,” he said. “It’s going to be expensive, but we always felt we had to do it. It’s never been a question whether we can do it or not.”