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Retiring AAC Commissioner Says ‘Power’ Struggle Will Succeed Him

daniel libit
·8 min read

There is no shortage of famous Charles de Gaulle quotes about leadership, but at this moment, Mike Aresco, commissioner of the American Athletic Conference, is left thinking about how the French president bid farewell to the job.

Some years ago, Aresco was vacationing with his wife in a quaint, Victorian hotel in the Irish countryside where he came across a plaque commemorating de Gaulle, who spent two weeks there following his resignation as president of France in 1969.

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As Aresco tells it, de Gaulle was confronted at one point on his stay by a flock of Irish journalists, who pressed him about the latest political domestic drama back at home. De Gaulle responded something to the effect of, “Gentlemen, these are matters that no longer concern me.”

In a similar spirit, Aresco says he is ready to move on from his metaphorical battles of the last decade, leading the AAC through its first decade of existence after it emerged from the dissolution of his previous conference, the Big East. Last week, the 73-year-old announced that he would be retiring next spring.

“I won’t look back,” Aresco told Sportico in a telephone interview from Maine, where he was enjoying a few days of respite after attending last Saturday’s Army-Navy football game.

Arguably, no other college sports executive has toiled as relentlessly as Aresco to bridge the widening chasm between college sports’ power conferences and the leagues that bear the Group of Five label Aresco so much despises.

“Maybe that is just not realistic, but you fight for it anyway,” Aresco said. “I hope my successor continues the big fight, because it is worth it—it is worth it for these student-athletes.”

Instead of expanding the NCAA’s power conference club from five to six, as he had endeavored, Aresco will leave behind just a quartet of autonomous leagues, following the recent casualty of the Pac-12. And all the signs indicate further consolidation of the elite in the coming years.

Nonetheless, Aresco foresees the AAC’s future in the upper reaches of intercollegiate athletics.

“If autonomy exists in any form, or a new [top] division takes shape, we fully expect to be in it,” said Aresco. “We aren’t finished. We lost some good schools, but we added some really good schools, who have the potential to invest and do what other schools have done.”

Previously a television executive with ESPN and CBS Sports, Aresco was named Big East commissioner in August 2012, just a month after that conference had settled a legal dispute with former member West Virginia over its decision to abscond to the Big 12 . Rather than that being the end of the Big East’s turbulence, the Mountaineers move was only a harbinger of the constant disruption that Aresco would face.

Two months later, the ACC and Big Ten announced their plans to accept Big East members Louisville and Rutgers, respectively. In response, Boise State, which had been set to join the Big East, decided to back out. Then came bedlam, when the Big East’s so-called “Catholic 7” members—DePaul, Georgetown, Marquette, Providence, St. John’s, Seton Hall and Villanova—decided to break away to form their own basketball-focused league, bolting with the rights to the Big East name and the prerogative to host its postseason basketball tournament in Madison Square Garden.

Aresco says this mass exit scuttled what had been promising media rights negotiations with Fox Sports, which ultimately signed a 12-year, $500 million deal with the new Big East.

“There has been misinformation that we abandoned them,” Aresco said. “But it was the basketball schools that went off on their own. We were left with no name and no logo … I didn’t even know our conference would survive.”

Aresco was left to pick up the pieces and build a new league around a quartet of former Big East all-sport members—UConn, Cincinnati, South Florida and Temple. (Louisville and Rutgers tagged along for a season before joining the ACC and Big Ten, respectively.)

In 2013, the American officially launched, with SMU, Houston, Memphis and Central Florida joining the four Big East predecessors. East Carolina, Tulane and Tulsa were added the following year.

From then on, Aresco’s charge was to reclaim for his new conference the “power” status—and automatic berth to a New Year’s bowl game—that had belonged to the Big East. In 2017, the AAC commenced a branding campaign referring to itself as a “P6” school and Aresco began his public lobbying effort to flatten the distinction between autonomy and non-autonomy FBS schools, at least in the mind of the media. On the field, at least, the American made compelling cases for its inclusion in the top tier of college sports.

UCF ended the 2017 football campaign as the only undefeated team in FBS, though it was still denied a berth to the College Football Playoffs. Nevertheless, the Knights concluded their perfect season that year with a victory over Auburn in the Peach Bowl.

In 2019, the American and ESPN agreed to a 12-year TV deal worth $1 billion, national exposure that Aresco says was crucial in helping to maintain the conference’s continuity, to the extent it has been able.

The commissioner acknowledges that the AAC was also aided in its infancy by the restrictions the NCAA placed on players, including scholarship limits and the provision that athletes must complete a whole academic year in residence at their new school before they could compete.

“That kept the stability of our rosters,” said Aresco. (On Wednesday, a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order that prevents the NCAA from enforcing its one-time transfer rule, following an antitrust lawsuit filed by seven state attorneys general.)

In 2021, Cincinnati became the first AAC school to compete for a football national championship, when it lost to Alabama in the semifinals of the 2021 CFP Playoffs. The resulting benefit to the league was short-lived, however, as nine months later, the Bearcats announced their plans to join the Big 12.

“We knocked on the door of the playoffs, so we were relevant for 10 years,” said Aresco. “I always took the position that I am not going to get angry with our schools [that left]. We knew there was a pecking order. Consequently, we knew if schools got invitations they would likely go. I felt we should maintain camaraderie, be gracious and I think it helped the conference stay together. We were the victims of our own success. And that is what happened.”

While Aresco was unable to establish the AAC as a power conference, he believes the legacy of the league’s first decade will be more than just a footnote.

“It gave these dozen schools at that time, and then a few others, a chance to continue to compete at the highest level and enabled them to knock on the door of the so-called P5,” Aresco said. “Had they splintered off, they wouldn’t have had the TV exposure or ability to build the programs they were able to build [in the AAC].”

In early 2022, Aresco wrote an open letter “to college football,” in which he advocated for a 6-6 playoff model that “reinforces what should be a cornerstone of the CFP, that every FBS team has equal access to the playoff.” He further called for the end of the Power 5-Group of 5 labeling, arguing that the class system within FBS was “arbitrary and harmful to the sport and to the perception of fairness.”

About six months before UCLA announced its intentions to move to the Big Ten, Aresco recalls, he had been discussing the prospect of the Pac-12 school entertaining such a move—though he assumed, for geographic reasons, it would not actually go through with it.

Had the Bruins and USC stayed in the Pac-12, Aresco says the American would have had a “reasonably good chance” of gaining autonomous status.

“You never know but we had so many things going for us then,” he said, noting his conference’s “competitive success.”

Nevertheless, Aresco says the job for the next AAC commissioner is to continue knocking on the door of college football’s most exclusive club.

“It probably will be harder, only because the money it will take will be greater,” he said. “We are about to embark on another arm’s race, just a different kind of arm’s race … But we’ve got schools that are going to be able to do that–they are going to have to struggle a bit, but are going to be able to do it.”

Aresco has six more months on the clock before turning things over to his yet-unnamed replacement, after which he foresees taking a page from de Gaulle.

“I really do want to call it a day,” he said. “I don’t want to be hovering over my successor. I think I owe I to my wife and family to wind down and have some fun.”

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