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Quote:Two situations where BYU should accept an AAC invite

UConn, one of the worst teams in the AAC just announced that they will leaving for the Big East, the conference that they came from just a few years ago, opening a spot(s) in the conference. The opening appears to be wide open to any P5 school, Army or BYU that wants to take the spot.

In most scenarios, I would say that BYU should not accept this offer. After all, BYU already makes P5 money, has an amazing future schedule in the future and has one of the best TV contracts in the nation. But there are two cases that I think that BYU should at least consider joining the AAC.

Three teams join

With the departure of UConn, now is the time that the AAC can make a move not only on one team but on three teams or more. It appears that the AAC is really trying to get to the P5 level and by essentially dropping the worst team and then gaining three really good teams, they could very well be considered in that conversation against the Big 12 and Pac 12 conferences

But they would have to specific teams, and one of them has to be Boise State. The other school would have to be another well recognized team that has spent significant time ranked in the past five years or so. Those teams would include Utah State, Appalachian State, Middle Tennessee, Army, or Air Force.

The conference could then be broken into two divisions geographically with:

West: BYU, Boise State, the third team added, Tulsa, Houston, Southern Methodist and Memphis
East: UCF, USF, East Carolina, Navy, Temple, Cincinnati and Tulane

BYU playing Boise State, Houston, Utah State/other quality program, Memphis and then two teams out of the east would give BYU at least five quality conference opponents plus three other games that would likely include Utah, another P5 and a G5 team.

This conference would be a security blanket for BYU once conference realignment happens in a few seasons and there would be no risk of BYU falling into a FCS or UMass/Liberty kind of situation.

Conference stays at twelve but BYU gets a lot of influence

This would take a lot of cooperation and probably wouldn’t happen but if BYU was able to keep the best four games each season that they have from 2023 on, and then play the eight AAC games, then I would say that BYU should listen.

The biggest complaint that I have heard to this point is that there is no way that BYU is going to buy out their games with the schools they already have scheduled. In the near future, BYU already has full schedules which would be really tough on the buyouts. But after 2022 BYU can work around that pretty easily.

The proposal would be that BYU Football doesn’t join until the 2023 season (other sports can join in 2021 when UConn leaves) and has the option to back out if invited by a P5 by then. The second half of the proposal would be that BYU gets to choose the four games they get to keep each season through 2027. That would look like this:

2023 – Virginia, Utah, USC and Arkansas:
Buyout Tennessee, UNLV and Stanford
2024 – Utah, NC State, Wyoming and UNLV
Buyout Hawaii and Georgia Southern
2025 – Hawaii, Stanford, Minnesota and Virginia (Utah in week zero under the Hawaii rule)
Buyout: None
2026 – Arizona and Virginia Tech
2027 – Arizona
2030 – Baylor

This option would only require five buyouts and would keep most of the games on the schedule. If this option was presented before BYU they should listen and consider joining the conference because again we don’t know what will happen after the conference realignment and which teams will be left in the dark.

Either way it is a risk.