What will change for Wichita State men’s basketball after AAC conference realignment
Football once again spurred the latest shuffling in conference realignment, as the American Athletic Conference raided six schools from Conference USA to stabilize itself.
Charlotte, Florida Atlantic, North Texas, Rice, Texas-San Antonio and UAB were all officially accepted by the AAC on Thursday, just six weeks after the conference learned three of its key members, Central Florida, Cincinnati and Houston, were leaving for the Big 12.
The timeline for arrivals and departures has yet to be finalized, although the moves are likely to be made in 2023 or 2024.
While football remains king everywhere else in the American, Shocker fans are probably more interested in how the recent conference moves will affect the Wichita State men’s basketball team.
AAC commissioner Mike Aresco told The Eagle back in September that he was confident the American was “going to have an excellent basketball league” moving forward.
But do those words hold true now that the six new additions have been finalized?
In short, Aresco faced an impossible task to replace Houston, a perennial top-15 program under Kelvin Sampson fresh off a Final Four run, and Cincinnati, a historically proud program that had played in nine straight NCAA Tournaments before missing last season. Even UCF had a March Madness win in 2019.
Regardless of the additions, the AAC’s claim as the unanimous best conference outside of the “power six” conferences was likely going away. Given the changes, the American will likely slip a tier and fall in line with the West Coast, Mountain West, Atlantic 10 and Missouri Valley as consistent, two-bid conferences.
The best men’s basketball addition among the C-USA crop appears to be UAB, a once-proud program hoping to return to those glory days under coach Andy Kennedy. The Blazers are off to a good start, as they figure to be conference title contenders this season with a preseason KenPom ranking of No. 71, just nine spots back from WSU. With two more seasons of Kennedy at the helm, it’s not unreasonable to expect UAB to be a team that could push for a NCAA at-large berth once it joins the American.
Another potentially strong addition is North Texas, which is trending in the right direction under coach Grant McCasland. The Mean Green finished in first place of the C-USA before the coronavirus pandemic abruptly ended the 2020 postseason, then followed that up by winning the conference tournament last season and knocking off No. 4 seed Purdue, 78-69, in the first round of the NCAA Tournament last March. But can North Texas hold onto McCasland, a clear rising star in the coaching ranks, by the time it plays its first season in the American?
But outside of those two, the other four programs — Charlotte, FAU, Rice and UTSA — offer very little in the way of recent men’s basketball success. In fact, none of those programs have finished in KenPom’s final top-100 rankings in the past decade.
It’s also worth pointing out the disparity between spending between the teams leaving the conference and joining the conference.
According to financial numbers from the 2019-20 season, the AAC is losing two of its biggest spenders in Houston ($9.2 million, No. 44 nationally) and Cincinnati ($7.6 million, No. 65 nationally). And even though UCF ($4.6 million, No. 101 nationally) was next-to-last in the AAC in spending, its budget was still considerably more than any incoming C-USA program, which ranged from UAB’s $3.5 million budget to UTSA’s $2.2 million budget.
In his introductory press conference on Thursday, Aresco focused on how he thought those programs could thrive in a new environment rather than what they have been in the past.
“Potential was enormously important, but potential is just that...potential,” Aresco said. “What we feel strongly about is we’re investing in the people we think have that vision and after getting to know them and talking to them, I’m more convinced than ever that they will make the investment and have the vision. These schools have the resources.
“If you have the resources and have the commitment, then you’ll grow a program. In fact, that’s what we’re very confident will happen.”
That could be true in the future, but in the present it’s difficult to imagine the new additions, outside of UAB, helping the AAC achieve its goal of placing at least three teams annually in the NCAA Tournament. In fact, the low ratings of FAU (KenPom No. 194 this season), Charlotte (KenPom No. 201) and UTSA (KenPom No. 237) could hurt the overall strength of the conference, which currently has its lowest-rated KenPom team at No. 166.
Soon the days of Wichita State playing nationally televised, Quadrant 1 games against Houston and Cincinnati will be gone, likely replaced by Quadrant 3 and 4 affairs streamed on ESPN+.
It’s difficult to argue the AAC will be anything other than a lesser basketball conference once the conference realignment changes are made, but that’s not to dismiss the American’s chances of remaining a good basketball conference.
Memphis, WSU and SMU would become the class of the conference with programs like Tulsa, Temple, UAB and North Texas capable of joining them. But with rumors that Memphis, SMU and Temple could still potentially be on the move in the coming years, it’s not time to exhale yet for WSU fans.
The addition of the new schools, specifically Charlotte and the three Texas schools, also could help boost WSU’s recruiting efforts in places they have leaned heavily recently. Assistant Tyson Waterman has made his mark in North Carolina, most recently with Ricky Council IV, while the whole staff have recruited Texas over the years for finds like Morris Udeze, Jaime Echenique and Qua Grant.
Perhaps the biggest difference going forward for WSU will be the margin of error it has during the conference season. The way it is now, a slip-up against a bottom-dweller could easily be made up with a good amount of Quadrant 1 and 2 games coming in AAC play. But with those quality chances likely dropping and the conference expanding, mostly with teams expected to be at the bottom-half, the number of nothing-to-gain, everything-to-lose contests for contending teams will be going up. Twenty-five win seasons will likely be a must again to return to March Madness.
Even if the move to the American now feels like to some fans as a step backward closer to where the Shockers were when they left the Missouri Valley, WSU believes the calculated risk of joining the AAC was one any school in its position would have done at the time.
It was impossible to know that the AAC would lose four of its top basketball programs — Connecticut, Houston, Cincinnati and UCF — this early into WSU’s run. While those defections no doubt lessen the overall strength of the conference, it’s easy to see how their exits increases Wichita State’s ability to win championships more regularly.
This new landscape isn’t what WSU envisioned when it jumped ship back in 2017, but it can still comfortably believe it is in a better situation in the American now, especially with a lucrative television deal with ESPN, than it was with the Missouri Valley.
But that doesn’t make it sting any less for WSU knowing how close it came to earning the major-conference respect it desires.
This story was originally published October 22, 2021 at 4:43 AM.
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