Mike Aresco, the first commissioner of the American Athletic Conference, has enjoyed an illustrious career with the AAC. That’s coming to an end when Aresco, 74, officially retires next month. June 3 will be his final day.
Aresco was first named commissioner of the Big East Conference Aug. 14, 2012. The Big East opted out of football as of June 30, 2013. Aresco led the way for a reinvention of the conference, the AAC, which began July 1, 2013.
Aresco will be replaced by former Rutgers athletic director Tim Pernetti. During his tenure, the AAC was known for its strength in football and over the last decade has been the top Group of Five football conference.
HERO Sports talked to Aresco about the AAC, its football future, the prospect of a Group of Five football tournament and more. Some of the comments have been edited for brevity.
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HERO Sports: Are you really going to be retired, is there a chance we will see you somewhere?
Mike Aresco: I promised my wife a few years ago that I wouldn’t go too much longer. We’ve got some grandkids and I love to go bicycle riding. I like to fly fish. A bunch of things we do. We’re going to move to Sun Valley, Idaho. We built a place there before the pandemic and it is big enough to have the kids over.
HS: Did the change in college athletics, including the NIL situation, drive you at all to retire, or were you going to do that anyway?
MA: I could honestly say that did not ultimately affect my decision. I am 74 and I feel great, but I just thought it was time to go. Now, do I like what’s going on now, no. Would I have stayed anyway, yes. If I were 10 years younger, five years younger, I would still be doing it, but I have to tell you, it’s hard to do something that you don’t believe in, and I don’t like what’s happening in college sports. I think the courts have really ruined it. I think the lawyers, they were looking at the fact that we all had these big rights fees. I think if we all had $100 rights fees, lawyers wouldn’t care about anything, but it’s just not an environment that I really enjoy anymore, but that wouldn’t have been the reason.
HS: Can you tell me what was your best accomplishment was and your biggest disappointment as commissioner of the AAC?
MA: In terms of the biggest accomplishment, I think keeping together as a conference back in 2012, 2013, was really hard and it easily could have been a Pac-12 situation where everybody just went off. We were given up for dead and we had nothing going for us. We had no TV deal. We had no name anymore after we had to give it to the Big East. We had no logo, we lost Madison Square Garden (for the conference men’s basketball tournament). We had a lot of negative press. We just had nothing, and we kept it together. I think the second thing (positively) was our P-6 campaign, which I think really spurred the conference to try to try to achieve, to invest. Obviously going through COVID was a terrible time, but I think our guys did a terrific job.
Note: The P-6 branding campaign aligned the AAC with the other then-Power Five conferences and celebrated the success the schools had against Power Five opponents.
MA: In terms of the biggest disappointment, it’s easy – not becoming an autonomy conference (known to many now as the Power 4). We were poised to go to the board and say, look we really deserve to be an autonomy. And then sure enough, Oklahoma and Texas left (the Big 12) and we lost three teams (Houston, Cincinnati, and UCF). The toughest thing too is realignment, but I think we’ve handled it as well as you can, but it’s a hard thing to deal with. You just can’t take it personally.
HS: I know you don’t like the term Group of Five, but there has been a little groundswell to have a football tournament among Group of Five teams. Would you favor that?
MA: No. I never have. It’s come up before. I don’t want to further isolate us from the so-called A4 because then the danger is that people view you as being in a separate division and that’s what it could lead to. Even now if we don’t spend the money that the A4, or at least do what they are doing, opt into what it looks like this lawsuit settlement is going to entail, they could easily say you are not even eligible for the CFP. We will play you, but you will be like FCS, considered in a third division and I just felt anything we did that would contribute to that isolation would stamp us as G5. I do hate the term. But I think anything we do in that regard is going to hurt us long term, even though there might be some immediate appeal to it. I don’t really find it appealing, but some people do, but I would urge our guys not to fall into that trap.
HS: Some people are suggesting that the reason to have a Group of Five football tournament is they think that you guys are going to eventually be kicked out anyway by the A4 and won’t be able to compete in the CFP. Do you think that’s possible?
MA: It is, but why hasten it or why encourage it? I think we would be foolish to give into that. And I think it’s our job to make it as difficult as possible for them to throw us out. We should fight it whichever which way we can because I think we need to be part of that group. We were right there on the cusp.
One of my goals 12 years ago when I thought, this is a tough deal, was I didn’t want our kids feeling like they were second-class citizens. And I felt that we had enough firepower in a conference. I think we still do because of the schools we took, the markets they are in, the money they have, the investments they could make, I thought we could be right there with the A4 and that meant you wouldn’t necessarily be viewed as second-class citizens. … In football, I thought we were right there and were a major conference. Look how many top 10 finishes we had, look how many big bowl games we won.
Note: In the last 10 years, the AAC has earned seven New Year’s Six bowl game appearances. The AAC won three of those seven bowl games. Houston beat Florida State 38-24 in the 2015 Peach Bowl. UCF beat Auburn 34-27 in the 2017 Peach Bowl and Tulane beat USC 46-45 in the 2022 Cotton Bowl. In addition, Cincinnati lost 24-21 to Georgia on a last-second field goal in the 2021 Peach Bowl.
MA: We made the playoffs (with Cincinnati in 2021), we were competing for the playoffs almost two-thirds of the time. We way outdid the other four (Group of Five conferences) and so I felt that we have separated ourselves and thought that was really important. And I just think you have to keep doing that. Because football means a lot to our campuses. And if we suddenly get relegated to an inferior division, the perception becomes really bad. It will affect the donors, it will affect the support on campus. Look what Tulane did (winning the AAC title during the 2022 season and beating USC in the Cotton Bowl while also reaching the AAC championship game this past season before losing to SMU). That galvanized that campus. And it did with Temple when they were good under Matt Rhule. They have fallen back, but when they were good, they were exciting. And the same with almost every one of our schools (that) have had success. … If I had said we were going to be the Big Ten or SEC, I would have been laughed out of the room, and rightfully so. You’ve got to have a reasonable vision. I thought our vision was not unreasonable that we could compete with those four. It was five at the time (before the Pac-12 dissolved) and I thought we did, and we can still do it. It’s going to be harder though because player movement is hurting us clearly. And the money is an issue. The NIL money, we’re losing players who are just getting bought and that is going to make it tougher, but we will just have to persevere.
