It's been a banner year for the American Athletic Conference, capped by an undefeated regular season by UCF and an appearance in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl. The Orlando Sentinel caught up with AAC commissioner Mike Aresco to discuss the impact of the Knights' appearance on the league and his goals for the future.
Orlando Sentinel: What does the Peach Bowl mean to the AAC?
Mike Aresco: "It means a lot because this has been a year where we generated some controversy on how high UCF was ranked. I suppose a lot of people will be looking at this as a litmus test to see whether the ranking is deserved. I don't think it should matter as much. I think they had a great season and deserved to be ranked highly. In the end, that's just the way our league is. We're judged that way. It's a pretty important game for us.
"Two years ago, we can into this game and Houston was an underdog to Florida State and won. This is probably the toughest opponent we've ever faced. I don't know how you can argue that Auburn isn't the toughest; they could easily be in the playoff. They beat two teams in the playoff and almost beat a third. They played three teams in that are in the playoff. This is a great test."
OS: Do you pay close attention to the record of the conference in bowl games or is the season more important?
Aresco: "I've always said the season is much more important. Bowl season is a very strange season. You've got a lot of interim coaches, you've got a lot of seniors, you've got players who are held out and don't play, you've got players who have injuries. And it's always good to win bowl games and it's always good to have a winning record in the bowls, but the bigger bowls like this are far more important. When Houston won a couple of years ago, we didn't have a great bowl season, but that was such a huge bowl win for the conference. You want your bowl teams to play well.
"Bowl season is very funny. I would much rather stake my claim to the regular season. But with a game like this, big game, big bowl games are important."
OS: The last couple of years, the AAC have lost a lot of talented, young coaches to Power 5 schools. What does the league have to do to keep some of that coaching talent around?
Aresco: "It's hard. There's only so much that you can go. I'm a realist. When you've got a chance to go to a Nebraska or you've got a chance to go to Arkansas. A program that can pay you a lot of money that can compete for national championships on an easier basis and that have a lot of other aspects to them with recruiting and the whole (Power 5) business. That's why we're trying to be a (Power 6), that's really important to us. Those are things really hard things to overcome. We can try and pay more, which we do. We try and pay as much as we can, we're probably in the middle level of the P5 now.
"I think second, we need to keep fighting to be in that playoff discussion so when coaches come here they think they have a shot.
"Three, we have to continue to recruit better and show people that these are schools that young people want to go to. Those kinds of things will help but they won't guarantee that coaches will be around. We've got to keep hiring the good coaches. If down the road, if these jobs could be destination jobs, nobody would be more thrilled than me."
Q: The men's basketball tournament returns to Orlando this year. What does that mean for the league?
Aresco: "It's going to be a great year in Orlando for us. The fact that we had the championship game in Orlando, there was some synergy there with the basketball tournament. We like the Orlando community. We think it will be great. Plus UCF, that's a team that's going to be on the cusp of a tournament bid."
