The AAC kicks off football season with speculation boiling over

NEWPORT, R.I. — The clambake is an annual tradition, going back to before the American Athletic Conference was a thing. It’s a very cool way to kick off the league’s media days, football coaches and players, athletic directors and league officials and yeah, even media mingling over a feast against the spectacular backdrop of Narragansett Bay.

This year, you might have heard, uncertainty looms over the future of the league. The Big 12 is expanding, and at this point, it might be shorter to list the American schools that are not candidates, real or perceived.

Given all of that, commissioner Mike Aresco knows just what Monday’s event needs:

More lobsters.

He laughs, saying he’s ordered 100 extra, and explaining: “If people are eating lobsters the whole time, maybe there won’t be time for questions.”

It’s a good line. But then Aresco learned the conference actually has expanded its order, for a more tangible reason. They almost ran out last year, as hungry football players gorged themselves on three and sometimes four of the big crustaceans.

“We needed more at the end,” he says. “These are big guys.”

And lobsters or no, these are big questions that threaten to overshadow the clambake, the football season and so much else, including the accomplishments a relentlessly positive commissioner loves to tout. Aresco is correct in his contention that, at least when it comes to football, the American has become the best Group of Five conference, surpassing the Mountain West in the past couple of years.

Last season alone, Houston beat Florida State in the Peach Bowl. Memphis beat Ole Miss. At one point, the league had four teams populating the College Football Playoff Top 25; for most of the season, it had three.

It’s for those reasons and more Aresco insists that at least when it comes to football, the gap between the American and the Power Five conferences is more perception than reality (although NCAA autonomy is a real thing that’s not going away, and the revenue gap between his league and those others is only going to grow.) But the best evidence might be the Big 12’s current focus.

Whether the Big 12 should expand or not, whether some combination of Group of Five schools will add value and solidify the league and maybe even secure its long-term future — none of that matters. It’s doing it. And several American members are potential targets. That’s partly a function of geography, but it’s also recognition that the American’s members are best positioned to make the move up.

“This speaks volumes to what we’ve built,” Aresco says.

How’s that for finding a silver lining? But perhaps the worst part of this storm, from anyone’s perspective, is how the process is playing out in public. For that, like so much else, blame the Big 12, whose presidents set off this frenzy by announcing they had directed commissioner Bob Bowlsby to reach out to schools that had previously expressed interest.

Whatever else that meant — a reverse bidding process, as in how low would you go to get into the Big 12? — it set in motion plenty of preening by candidates.

In some cases, it has veered toward absurdity. See East Carolina, which has not been on most of those speculative candidate lists, but which has unleashed a Twitter barrage peddling its assets.

Did you know East Carolina “would be an excellent travel partner with West Virginia”? Or that the school’s average football attendance of 45,814 the past five years leads all Group of Five schools? Or that its donor base and annual donations were the largest in the American in the last school year? If you’ve seen Twitter, you know now.

Sticking solely with American members (this isn’t a slap at BYU, Boise State, Colorado State or add your favorite team here ________), Cincinnati, Connecticut, Houston, Memphis, SMU, Tulane, UCF and USF haven’t shrunk from making their feelings known, either. Athletic directors and presidents have weighed in. Politicians and pop stars, too.

“It’s disappointing that it’s been so public, because that hasn’t served anyone very well,” Aresco says. “It has put enormous pressure on our presidents and athletic directors. They all have boards, donors, fan bases. (The chance to join) the Power Five is attractive. It would be silly to deny. So therefore, there’s that enormous pressure, because it has been so public.”

And so fast. The Big 12’s timeline is aggressive — invitations by October, or sometime in September, or maybe even before the season kicks off. And there’s at least a chance the changes could take place in time for the 2017 season. Aresco says he’s been in constant communication with his league’s presidents and athletic directors and has tried to empathize with them.

“I have to be sensitive to what my guys are going through,” he says. “They’re all going through a lot.”

Of course, so is Aresco. But he and the league have been through it before, growing out of the breakup of the Big East, the basketball schools going one way, the football schools going another and emerging as the American. Not long after that, they weathered the loss of Rutgers to the Big Ten and Louisville to the ACC.

“It was a pretty tough situation,” Aresco says. “Pretty dire. … It was a pretty significant challenge for us. We got through it and had a good group of schools.”

But now two or maybe four of that group might soon be on their way to the Big 12. Which also means a bunch of American members that really want to get into the Big 12 won’t.

“Whatever happens, we’ll have most of our high-achieving teams still here,” Aresco says. “It’s been a good top-to-bottom league. … We’ll get right back to building up the league.”

He says he’s been expecting this, in some ways, for more than a year. Ever since Oklahoma President David Boren began calling the Big 12 “psychologically disadvantaged,” Aresco has been considering contingency plans, even though “you’re just shadowboxing until you know what happens.”

When the ACC announced its conference network and the extension of its members’ grant of rights, Aresco didn’t exactly foresee the Big 12’s sudden reversal — from tabling expansion to accelerating it, apparently in one meeting — because no one did. But he wasn’t completely surprised.

“It’s not a situation you welcome at all, obviously,” he says. “Yet it’s been there because of the nature of the Power Five right now and the size of the Big 12. So it’s always been percolating.”

The American’s rules stipulate a 27-month notice and a $10 million exit fee for departing schools, though if, as expected, the Big 12 moves more quickly, you can probably ratchet up the buyout a few million. Whenever it happens, those contingency plans will unfold, and the American might poach some schools from other Group of Five leagues.

“We’ll be OK,” Aresco says. “We’re not gonna dilute the brand, whatever happens. We could stay at 10 or we might go to 12 again. But we’re not gonna add schools just for the sake of adding schools.”

(If only, some Big 12 types are thinking right about now, their league had the same philosophy.) “Once this is over, we’ve still got a really, really strong conference that has a goal to make it the ‘Power Six,’ ” Aresco continues. “I think we can continue this progress.”

Either way, the topic threatens to overshadow the American’s annual football kickoff, and there’s not much the commissioner can do about it. It’s on the agenda for his meetings this week with the league’s athletic directors. Outside those, Aresco has asked athletic directors and coaches to stick to football — “We don’t want the Big 12 to be the focus,” he says, “it would be unfair to our teams” – but he knows that’s probably not realistic.

He’s been open in multiple interviews, and he promises to address the issue Tuesday in his state of the conference remarks.

“I’ll be honest about it,” he says. “I’ll confront it. I won’t pretend there’s no elephant in the room.”

Also, he’ll offer plenty more lobsters.