Not a frequent poster, but a fairly dedicated lurker. This background is to state that like many of you, I have watched or listened to most of the Aresco public comments regarding the conference since its inception.

I think that when Aresco was referring to "strategy," he was referring to one or both of two things:

1. How does the AAC get an automatic bid in an expanded college football play-off or otherwise most advantage itself in an expanded play-off scenario.

2. How does the AAC become the sixth autonomy conference (which isn't necessarily the same as being the sixth "power" conference).

Each of these two things is separate and each requires (potentially) a different strategy to accomplish. While adding one or more strong football teams might facilitate the first of these two strategies, it would only be one small piece of the strategy. Moreover, it would likely have no impact on the second of these strategies.

If my thoughts are correct, other than talking about expansion, which this board does non-stop, I'm not sure any of us is close enough to the situation to offer constructive advice. As to the first strategy, we would have to know commissioner/president/AD sentiment and vote counts for various competing expansion plans and be able to tally this sentiment and vote counts to see if there is a path forward. In this vein of thought, someone might volunteer that the PAC 12 would likely be a definite proponent of expansion, but not necessarily of an AAC auto-bid. And after a few more of these generalized comments, we would likely run out of material to discuss.

For the second, we would have to know the same, plus the inner workings of the NCAA on submitting a proposal to change the legislative status of a conference from non-autonomous to autonomous. If this second strategy were easy, the conference would have done it already.