An American Identity Crisis

Split Zone Duo: College Football Podcast

Richard Johnson and Alex Kirshner

News, Sports, Sports News, Football

4.9 • 916 Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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The American Athletic Conference was by far the best non-power conference of the early College Football Playoff era. Its best teams were nationally relevant. Many programs were on the rise, and so were the league’s coaches, who went on to Power Five jobs and then got replaced by coaches who often did the same.

Lately, things have not gone as well. The American lost its best teams to the Big 12, and the programs that backfilled those spots have yet to show anything. The hiring train of AAC coaches has slowed down, and the conference has moved backward while several non-power programs outside the league have ascended. The best program in the league, Memphis, is trying hard to get out.

The league literally renamed itself last week, going away from “AAC” and opting to just be called “the American.” As the league literally redefines itself, Godfrey joins Alex and Richard for a discussion of how the American got here and where it might be going over the next few years.

Producer: Anthony Vito

Transcript

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0:00.0	We're coming, and we ain't backing down.
0:01.8	We don't need a bunch of cats in here looking in the mirror.
0:04.5	Everybody just do your job.
0:06.7	You understand that?
0:07.7	Hey, were you shut up? I'm bitterly disappointed with the officiating today. Guys being dudes. And they run through our like a shit through a ten horn, man. Ah, fuck it. Thank you, Lee. Time was not that long ago that the American Athletic Conference was by far
0:22.3	the best college football conference outside the Power 5. This was true in a lot of different ways.
0:27.8	Number one, the G5's best ranked teams in the playoff picture were almost always from the American,
0:34.0	be they Houston in 2015, UCF in 2017 and 18, Cincinnati in 20. I'm skipping a
0:40.5	Memphis in there that played Penn State in the Fiesta Bowl. These included, of course,
0:44.7	the only non-power playoff team of the four-team era, that being Cincinnati in 2020.
0:51.5	SP Plus and Sagan-C concurred that the quality of play in this league was just higher than other G5 leagues.
0:56.9	The coaching industry concurred to.
0:58.6	A whole bunch of guys used the American as a rung on the latter, be they Tom Herman to Texas,
1:03.5	Scott Frost to Nebraska, Matt ruled the Baylor, Justin Fuente to Virginia Tech, his successor,
1:08.9	Mike Norvell to FSU, Willie Taggart to Oregon, or several
1:12.6	others. And the NFL seemed to see it this way as well. In 2018, six schools from this league
1:17.6	had multiple players drafted, which is kind of crazy for a non-power conference. One of them,
1:22.1	SMU's Cortland Sutton, I saw was just getting a big second contract in the NFL the other day,
1:27.4	all these years later.
1:28.8	The American would happily tell us all about this.
1:32.2	The old commissioner, Mike Oresco, liked to pound his chest.
1:35.1	He started a media campaign with a helmet sticker to have the American referred to as part of the P6.
	...

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