CINCINNATI, OHIO – DECEMBER 19: The American Athletic Conference logo on the field after the game between the Cincinnati Bearcats and the Tulsa Golden Hurricane at Nippert Stadium on December 19, 2020 in Cincinnati, Ohio. (Photo by Justin Casterline / Getty Images)
BYU Football would fit perfectly with the American Athletic Conference and the AAC would fit perfectly with BYU.
This article is for anyone and everyone in the AAC conference as well as BYU fans. I hope that it will help give the idea of BYU Football taking part in the conference as a pure football school or a pure sports school to gain some momentum.
In this article, I’ll cover five reasons the Cougars should be considered a member of the American Athletic Conference: market, location, history, recruitment, and possibly most importantly, prestige.
I hope someone gets their hands on this somewhere and maybe begins to really consider BYU as a good option. I also hope to help BYU fans see that the AAC is an advance on the Cougars that are currently.
market
With the NIL and the transfer portal bringing drastic changes to college football, teams will survive in large markets while others will shrink and become second or third division. We could soon see a reality where teams like Mississippi State (Starkville) or Kansas State (Manhatten) become transfer ghost towns. Honestly, why would someone hoping to get support and make money on their name and image want to go to Starkville when they can go to a bigger market like Orlando or Houston?
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the sports industry in the past five years, it’s this one; Money talks and that goes for teams and players.
How this benefits the AAC
BYU is a very unique market. While Provo isn’t exactly Cincinnati or Tampa, it belongs to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a church of nearly 7,000,000 members in the U.S., and while they’re not all BYU fans, it’s safe to say that likely 25% of them are. BYU also has 370,000 living alumni members who are scattered across the country. Unlike most universities, most BYU students come from abroad, not from the state. When they graduate, they move back to where they came from. If you go to a BYU street game you will see thousands of fans. TV commentators tend to believe that BYU fans travel well, even though most fans traveled the same distance to the game as the home team fans.
What does that have to do with the market? There are many LDS membership-owned companies. Marriott, NuSkin, JetBlue, Bain Capital and VidAngel to name a few. While not all of these companies are in Provo, the church affiliation makes them part of the market. Imagine having a picture of a BYU player on every single Marriott hotel brochure with the AAC logo on the bottom … Not bad, right?
Not to mention that Silicon Slopes, the fastest growing tech industry in the United States, is just 20 minutes north of Provo. Do you think they know how to run some advertising campaigns for BYU or other AAC schools?
Benefits for BYU
The AAC brings the east to the mountain west. Suddenly, companies have a reason to promote BYU players outside of Utah. This is how conferences work. Sure, nobody loves seeing their rival on a billboard in their hometown, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t still there. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen Arkansas-based promotions involving LSU. It just happens. By participating in a conference, BYU is opening up its market to the entire country east of Utah.
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