 |
| UCF's Blake Bortles should be the AAC's most important player not named Teddy Bridgewater. |
The new American Athletic Conference was born out of the great schism between the Big East's "Catholic 7" and the conference's not-so-Catholic, football playing members.
Those seven schools chose to separate and form a league for "basketball-minded schools" (No, the ridiculousness of Catholic institutions calling themselves basketball-minded is not lost on me), and they took the Big East name with them.
Left in their wreckage is the AAC, a conference now comprised of teams on their way to the greener pastures of more powerful conferences (Louisville and Rutgers), teams desperately trying to follow those schools out the door (Cincinnati and UConn), a late Big East addition stuck in limbo (South Florida), a team the Big East once cast off (Temple), and a horde of former Conference USA squads (Central Florida, Houston, Memphis and SMU).
