AAC football once again full of great coaches (and Trent Dilfer)

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Today in college football news, chickens are brining patriotically.

2025 Countdown: Being in the middle isn’t bad

First, yes, I’m pretending I intentionally scheduled the American Athletic Conference edition of this newsletter’s 2025 preview series for the Fourth of July. 🇺🇸 Next, the memory-jogging AAC basics:

Last year, Army and Navy took over the league in their first-ever year as conference foes. Army won the AAC, but Navy won 31-13 in the game that means infinitely more to both schools. They went 21-4 in games against everyone besides each other, even though they’d had to reinvent themselves due to new NCAA rules.
This year, pretty much everyone agrees the AAC favorite is Tulane (more on that in a sec), followed in alphabetical order by Army, Memphis, Navy, USF and UTSA.

In the bigger picture, the AAC remains a transient realm on the fringes of everything, in ways both good and … tolerable. Not a girl, but not yet a woman, in the words of one Mississippian. Just one example: Other than reigning champ Jeff Monken, every head coach who has ever won an AAC title game has soon wound up in a power-conference job.

Chronological order: Matt Rhule, Scott Frost, Josh Heupel, Mike Norvell, Luke Fickell, Willie Fritz and Rhett Lashlee.

It often seems like a curse, being the conference long thought of as juuust a step shy of the powers. Schools with more money turn to you first when they need new coaches, and the same goes for big leagues looking to splatter themselves across even more of the map via realignment.

But there’s absolutely an upside. The AAC has a place in the pecking order, and it’s far from the bottom. I know AAC fans hate seeing their league constantly referred to as if it’s just a proving ground for ascendant coaches. Of course it’s more than that. It’s the conference that revived the Memphis-UAB Battle for the Bones trophy, for one thing. [In the newsletter version, I included a photo of the trophy. Subscribe today for photos of trophies.]

But I wonder this: How much does the AAC’s transience really matter, when the conference has long proved itself capable of replenishing?

Consider Tulane. Despite losing Fritz to Houston, the Green Wave returned to the conference title game in year one under Jon Sumrall (swiped from Troy). And this season, despite losing about a dozen contributors to bigger programs, the New Orleans school is arguably the G5 favorite to land a CFP spot — because Tulane has yoinked “a mid-major all-star team” away from lower-tier programs, as Bill Connelly put it.

In Chris Vannini’s ranking of 2025’s best G5 coaches, the AAC dominates the top (No. 2 Sumrall, No. 3 Monken, No. 5 Jeff Traylor of UTSA, No. 7 Ryan Silverfield of Memphis), but it’s No. 9 Tim Albin of Charlotte who stands out to me. After going 30-10 in the last three years at Ohio, the Oklahoma native jumped from one of the MAC’s best programs to one of the AAC’s worst.

Now imagine an AAC title-winning coach making a similar move, leaving for a P4 lightweight like Mississippi State or Purdue — rather than for Tennessee (like Heupel) or Wisconsin (like Fickell). Farfetched!

The AAC has earned its rep as the league always shepherding the nation’s best pound-for-pound collection of coaches. And that means its standards are far too high for, say, coaches who have gone 7-17 in the football-revering state of Alabama while also doing frequent gaffes and bloopers. Good god, that’s Trent Dilfer’s music! (It’s probably Kenny Chesney.)

Let’s end with a question on the perpetual duality of the AAC: Will this league produce both this cycle’s hottest P4 candidate and the season’s first firing? Looking at a UAB schedule in which the Blazers might not be favored in any games after Week 3, along with revisiting this David Ubben story on everything that’s gone wrong in the Dilfer era, there’s a good chance.

Quick Snaps

🌽 Along with the ads you’ve probably seen in our newsletters for Ndamukong Suh‘s new podcast here at The Athletic, here is the world’s fastest Suh interview, delivered at the speed of one sack of Colt McCoy:

If it were up to you, which of Nebraska’s rivals would you add to the Big Ten?

Easy. Oklahoma.

Roughly how many times have people told you that you deserved more votes than you got in the 2009 Heisman race?

More times than I can count.

🌀 “Some other schools — notably Texas Tech, Miami and Oregon — will have the chance to prove otherwise, but I’m here to crown LSU as the winners of the offseason transfer portal.” Manny Navarro explains what that could mean this season.

📺 “The ACC is the first conference to use TV figures as a metric for conference payouts. Clemson estimated that the new model could yield an additional $120 million over a six-year period. That’d be enough to make the Tigers financially competitive with top programs in the SEC or Big Ten.” New details on ACC money.

🤔 “Perhaps his silence was a product of not being familiar enough with the college media landscape.” On the Big Ten having less messaging oomph than its alleged best new buddy, the SEC.

🧢 A month ago, Alabama ranked No. 45 in the 247Sports Composite. As of now, make that No. 7. Grace Raynor explains Kalen DeBoer’s national surge, plus big developments elsewhere in recruiting.

House Rules: This week in CFB funny money

Two brief notes:

Per Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger, “319 NCAA DI schools chose to opt into the House settlement for the 2025-26 academic year.” The remaining 46 Division I schools include service academies and “non-scholarship” athletic departments like those in the Ivy League. Remember when we were told for years that only the very tippy-top schools would have interest in paying their athletes?
The new College Sports Commission, which will attempt to wallet-watch the NIL money received by college athletes, “won’t be sharing compensation information for its employees,” it said in response to a question by Sportico about CSC CEO Bryan Seeley’s salary. But how can we be sure Seeley isn’t being paid more than whatever a third party might determine “fair market value” to be? Don’t we need a College Sports Commissioners Commission?

Mandel’s mailbag

What if the ACC and the Big 12 made a trade? ACC gets: Cincinnati, West Virginia and UCF. Big 12 gets: Stanford, Cal and SMU. Who says no? — Andy J., Columbus, Ohio

It makes way too much sense.

Stanford and Cal get to reunite with Arizona/Arizona State/Colorado/Utah, plus frequent nonconference foe BYU. SMU gets back natural rival TCU and fellow Southwest Conference expats Baylor, Texas Tech and Houston. Meanwhile, Cincinnati and West Virginia used to be in the Big East with Pitt, Syracuse, Louisville and Boston College. (The Mountaineers also overlapped with Virginia Tech.) And UCF gets more bus rides to Tallahassee and Miami, fewer flights to Stillwater and Ames.

Now, the Stanford and Cal administrations were pretty dismissive of Big 12 academics last time around, but that was before they got stuck playing 3,000 miles from home for a 30 percent paycheck. Presumably, times have changed. But would the Big 12 want them? On the one hand, they don’t exactly help your football or men’s basketball products. But it’s not like the schools they’re losing are necessarily headliners, either. Not to mention the Bay Area schools would immediately become the best programs in many of the Big 12’s Olympic sports.

More Mandel mailbag here.