Evaluating the AAC’s expansion options without UCF, Cincinnati and Houston
BYU, UCF, Cincinnati and Houston are headed to the Big 12, and it could become official by the end of this week, according to many reports.
Three of those four teams hail from the AAC, which will be cut down to eight schools spread across the country from Dallas (SMU) to Tampa (South Florida) to Philadelphia (Temple) to Wichita (Wichita State, which doesn’t play football).
So where does the AAC go from here? It seems unlikely that the league would want to add any teams that don’t fall within the existing footprint, which is certainly large enough as it is. And even if the league wanted to add, say, Boise State, I’m not sure the Broncos would be interested in joining a far-flung league that no longer includes UCF or Houston.
That leaves schools from Conference USA, the Sun Belt Conference and the Mid-American Conference as the AAC’s top options to go after. All of the schools in those conferences fall roughly within the AAC’s current footprint.
To see which of those schools could work best in the AAC, I ran some numbers to try to evaluate each programs value relative to each other.
I ranked every football program from those conferences based on their average score in five metrics, to get a broad sense at which schools could make for the best additions. Those metrics are:
Home attendance: The number of people attending each home game is one way to measure the size and passion of a fan base. College Football News calculated the five-year attendance average for every FBS school after the 2019 season.
Market size/share: In 2011, Nate Silver calculated the number of fans of each college football team using market population and survey data. The data might look a little different if redone in 2021, but it’s as strong a methodology for determining the number of fans that I’ve seen.
Valuation: After the 2019 season, the Wall Street Journal calculated how much each college football program would be worth on the open market if it could be bought and sold like a professional sports franchise. The valuations take into account revenues and expenses, along with cash-flow adjustments, risk assessments and growth projections.
Social media following: It’s not perfect, but one easy way to measure the size of each fan base is to look at how many people follow each team on social media. As TV moves over to digital, it’s valuable to look at which teams have the largest followings in the digital space.
Wins: At the highest levels, brand value is more important than winning on the field. But at this level, where none of the brands are super strong, being able to win and potentially score an invitation to an expanded playoff carries more weight. This metric simply ranks teams by number of games won from 2015–19.
Ranking the most valuable expansion options
I ranked 49 football programs: Every team from the AAC (11), Conference USA (14) and Sun Belt (10), plus independents UConn, UMass, Liberty and New Mexico State.
UConn likely isn’t an actual option, since the Huskies just left the AAC last summer, but I included them anyway.
Current AAC football programs are in bold.
- South Florida
- Memphis
- Temple
- East Carolina
- Navy
- Southern Miss
- Marshall
- Army
- SMU
- UConn
- Toledo
- UAB
- Troy
- Western Michigan
- Arkansas State
- Appalachian State
- Louisiana Tech
- North Texas
- Ohio
- Louisiana
- Western Kentucky
- Florida Atlantic
- Florida International
- Buffalo
- Northern Illinois
- Middle Tennessee State
- Tulane
- Akron
- UTSA
- Central Michigan
- Georgia Southern
- Miami (Ohio)
- Rice
- Old Dominion
- Tulsa
- UTEP
- Liberty
- Eastern Michigan
- Bowling Green
- ULM
- Coastal Carolina
- Georgia State
- Ball State
- Texas State
- South Alabama
- Kent State
- New Mexico State
- Charlotte
- UMass
Note: UAB did not field a football team in 2015 or 2016, which hurt its numbers in home attendance and total wins. If I were to re-run the numbers with UAB’s average home attendance and number of wins from 2017–19 applied to a five-year span, UAB would jump all the way from No. 12 to No. 4.
The non-AAC schools that ranked highest largely came from Conference USA. Marshall and Southern Miss were the top two, ranking ahead of three current AAC programs. The Thundering Herd and Golden Eagles play in small markets, but both have passionate fan bases.
And if the AAC added these schools, it could also rekindle some old rivalries: Marshall-East Carolina, Southern Miss-Memphis, Southern Miss-Tulane.
Army was the highest-rated program not currently in the AAC or Conference USA. The academy played in Conference USA from 1998–2004 but has otherwise remained independent in football. It’s hard to say whether the Knights would benefit from joining the AAC as a football-only member, like Navy did in 2015.
