LAS COLINAS, Texas — Mike Aresco’s office has never really been completely organized. Located on the third floor of a nondescript suburban Dallas office building that happens to also house the College Football Playoff, it is littered with boxes of sports memorabilia: Tickets, photos, game balls, seats from old Yankee Stadium. He has nowhere to put it all.
After 40 years in sports, the retiring American Athletic Conference commissioner has been to every major sporting event and met everyone who works in sports, or at least it feels that way. He has asked to leave some of the mementos in the AAC office when he goes. He can’t take it all to Sun Valley.
When Aresco leaves the office this week, it will mark the end of one of the more influential and consequential careers in recent college sports history. Many fans know Aresco as the AAC commissioner who advocated for the Group of 5’s national reputation and CFP access to anyone who would listen.
But that was just his second act. His first was as a TV executive at ESPN and CBS, one who was integral in all kinds of changes from Thursday night college football, to the SEC on CBS, to Army-Navy, to the NCAA Tournament’s move away from regional broadcasts.
“Mike’s legacy is solid gold, quite frankly,” said former CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus.
Aresco leaves ahead of a college football season that will feature a guaranteed playoff spot for the Group of 5 for the first time ever, a commissioner’s dream fulfilled. As for the rest of college sports, the future is as uncertain as ever.
“Mike’s greatest legacy is that he had the strength and courage to fight,” Houston men’s basketball coach Kelvin Sampson said. “A fight that, in some ways, could not be won.”
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A CFP conference room clash was nothing compared to mixing cement and digging ditches, which is what a young Aresco did for his uncle’s company while growing up in Connecticut. The grandson of Italian immigrants, Aresco described his childhood as a “Leave it to Beaver” life with various dirty jobs like construction or cleaning oil tankers, in which an air hose kept cleaners from suffocating.
“It was the hardest job I ever had,” Aresco said with a chuckle.
His path to sports was an unusual one. He went to law school, but couldn’t figure out what he wanted to do. He interned as a foreign relations aide to Sen. Robert P. Griffin in Washington D.C. He worked for the Hartford city attorney’s office and ruled on parking tickets. He worked on the organized crime task force and learned about mobsters. Colleagues wanted him to run for public office.
One night in 1983 while out to dinner with his wife, Aresco recounted a Boston Globe story he had read about an MLB ownership situation, only to have a man at the next table tap him on the shoulder to get in on the discussion. Steve Saferin had recently moved to Connecticut to be ESPN’s director of program acquisitions. The two struck up a friendship, and Saferin later suggested that Aresco join ESPN’s legal team. A family friend who was a retired federal judge advised against it.
“Twenty-four hours of sports is not going to work,” the judge said.
Aresco didn’t care for private law practice, so he went to ESPN. He handled sports contracts, and when a programming job opened up a few years later as the company continued to expand, Aresco took it. He handled 20 different sports, from horse racing to yachting to bodybuilding to pro wrestling. He spent time with people like Bob Arum, Wayne Gretzky and Greg Gagne.
But it was college football and basketball where Aresco had particular skill with relationships and scheduling. He flew all over the country to meet with commissioners, athletic directors and coaches, sometimes to work on deals, other times just to build relationships.
“We got to know each other’s families, did deals together,” former Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany said. “I always enjoyed Mike. He’s got such an active mind.”
Aresco gets credited for starting ESPN’s Thursday night college football broadcasts, though he thinks College Football Association director Chuck Neinas came up with the idea. Still, it was Aresco who convinced Nebraska coach Tom Osborne to open the 1994 season on a Thursday at Texas Tech. In early 1995, Aresco thought Virginia could have a good season, so he helped convince the ACC to make Florida State’s November trip to Charlottesville a Thursday game. The Cavaliers beat the No. 2 Seminoles on a goal line stand, ending FSU’s 29-game winning streak, and Aresco was there to watch it.
“It was the most exciting night of college football ESPN had perhaps ever had,” he said.
He also helped develop “Bowl Week” before leaving ESPN for CBS, where he oversaw all college programming.
It was at CBS in the late 1990s when Aresco began to hear from fans in the Northeast who wanted to watch SEC football, especially Steve Spurrier’s Florida, instead of their regional Big East game. Aresco brought to McManus the idea of a national SEC package, which was not the norm at the time. Aresco, McManus and senior VP Tony Petitti, now the Big Ten commissioner, went to Birmingham to pitch the conference.
“There was a risk in that because college football was considered regional,” Aresco said. “And the SEC wasn’t yet what it is today.”
“Can the SEC be a national package? No one thought of it that way,” Petitti said. “It was just a different idea we believed in.”
The package was a success, but it didn’t truly take off until the mid-2000s, when the SEC began its run of seven consecutive national championships. Aresco negotiated a 15-year extension in 2008, which ended with the 2023 season. In hindsight, that became one of the most network-friendly contracts in the history of the sport.
“The SEC on CBS became a mantra,” Aresco said. “Verne (Lundquist) had a huge impact on that with Gary Danielson. The SEC went on that tear, and you had to watch SEC football. Suddenly our ratings were going through the roof.”
As college football’s conference championship weekend grew crowded, Aresco had another idea: making the Army-Navy Game on CBS a standalone event by pushing it back a week.
The game’s ratings had been falling. The NCAA would allow the move, and the NFL still couldn’t play on that day. The experiment began in 2009, and the game’s ratings immediately skyrocketed. It remains one of the season’s most-watched games each year.
“His vision and insight was the reason why the game moved,” Navy athletic director Chet Gladchuk said. “It’s more than a game (now), it’s an event, and all that expansion of awareness and value came about as a result of Mike’s initiative there.”
Aresco’s other major responsibility at CBS was the NCAA Tournament. He was one of the few people who got the bracket before it was publicized, allowing him to set up the time slots for each game. In the 2000s, McManus, Aresco and Pettiti would sit together in the command center during the first and second rounds, with every game on a screen. Before every game was broadcast nationally, it was this trio who determined which fans watched which games, an adrenaline-pumping responsibility, carried out with the knowledge that some fans would be upset no matter what.
“We’d be in the midst of two or three games crashing to conclusion at the same time, and it was an absolute and total madhouse,” McManus said. “The three of us worked well.”
But regional broadcasts had become part of a bygone era, and the tournament contract was a financial problem for CBS. In danger of losing March Madness, CBS teamed with Turner Sports in 2010 to win the NCAA Tournament contract again, narrowly edging out ESPN. Aresco spent the entire Masters weekend negotiating in the Augusta National clubhouse, with McManus getting the call on Sunday night after the tournament.
Today, every tournament game is broadcast on television to everyone. It was Aresco’s job to set up the new TV schedule, with Petitti’s help, and the tournament’s staggered start times continue to this day.
By 2012, the Big East was dragging on its TV negotiations with CBS, and Aresco was getting frustrated with the league. Syracuse and Pitt were on their way out, and the conference had an interim commissioner. USF athletic director Doug Woolard told Aresco the league needed someone like him. The move from TV executive to commissioner is common now, but it was unheard of when Aresco took the Big East job, feeling he understood the league’s problems and could stabilize a historic conference that meant a lot to him.
Things got worse before they got better. Within a few months, Rutgers and Maryland announced moves to the Big Ten and Notre Dame partnered with the ACC.
“Those things are always done in secret,” Aresco said. “If I’d known that, would I still have taken the job? I don’t know.”
In early 2013, the Catholic 7 non-football schools also left, taking the Big East name with them as part of exit negotiations. Aresco’s conference was on the verge of collapse, without a name or a TV contract. He worried the league’s recent additions from Conference USA might go back, or that Navy football might back out.
“It was a complete mess,” he said.
Aresco says he was on the phone constantly for a month, trying to calm nerves and keep everyone together. He promised members he’d get a TV deal with good exposure, which finally came from ESPN. That kept things afloat.
“Mike was the backbone and stabilizing force and brought a sense of confidence that it would survive the transition,” Gladchuk said. “We had moments of second-guessing. But we felt confident Mike would find that way ahead.”
Finally off the cliff’s edge (and sporting a new name suggested by UConn president Susan Herbst), the AAC got rolling as soon as it began play in 2013. UCF won the Fiesta Bowl in the final year of the BCS. UConn men’s and women’s basketball won national championships in 2014. Houston won the Peach Bowl two years later after the AAC champ garnered the Group of 5’s New Year’s Six spot.
When UCF football went undefeated in 2017 (with a Peach Bowl win over Auburn) and the 2018 regular season, Aresco stepped into the role of public advocate. He called out the CFP selection committee and the media for not taking his league seriously, rattling off game results like an encyclopedia. Onlookers rolled their eyes at the AAC’s “Power 6” marketing campaign, but it was all an attempt to gain respect and put a spotlight on the league’s success and investment, which was higher than other G5 leagues. Sampson regularly wrote letters of appreciation to Aresco.
“I’d thank him for being our champion, because I could feel it,” Sampson said. “We’d win conference championships and he was always there to hand that trophy to our kids. He worked his butt off for the conference. Whatever positivity came with being in the conference, we owe most of that to Mike.”
GO DEEPER
Revamped by realignment, the AAC isn’t planning for a drop-off
AAC football earned the G5 New Year’s Six spot again in 2019 (Memphis) and 2020 (Cincinnati), with the Bearcats nearly knocking off Georgia. Finally in 2021, Cincinnati earned a spot in the four-team CFP. For Aresco, it was validation of what he always felt could be accomplished in the AAC.
“He believed in our conference so deeply and it showed,” Cincinnati athletic director John Cunningham said. “He championed us the entire time. He was a bulldog at times, but he did it out of his love for our conference and his belief in our student-athletes, that they deserved to be on that stage.”
Although Cincinnati was leaving for the Big 12, it was a proud moment; the same went for Houston’s 2021 men’s Final Four appearance. Those highlights happened with AAC logos on the jerseys. The conference became what Aresco always thought it could be, before realignment took another bite.
As Tim Pernetti steps in to replace Aresco as commissioner, the AAC’s place in the future of college football is uncertain. The new College Football Playoff deal keeps a spot for the Group of 5 beyond 2025, but nearly all of the additional revenue beginning in 2026 goes to the Power 4. Aresco fought as best he could against it. There just wasn’t much leverage.
“It’s the same Mike I saw on the programming side,” Petitti said of commissioner debates with Aresco. “Instead of building the best schedule for ESPN or CBS, it was building the best environment for the AAC. It felt like the same guy I worked with. He’s going to fight as hard as he can.”
It’s not yet clear what future revenue sharing through the House v. NCAA settlement will mean for the Group of 5. Everyone in the G5 is concerned about getting boxed out, whether by the Power 4 or the Big Ten and SEC. The AAC is helped by its ESPN deal running into 2032, which brings internal stability. The addition of Army football this summer will keep the league at 14 teams after SMU departs for the ACC. But things are always changing.
Aresco believes college sports is at its best when everyone has a seat at the table. But he’ll no longer be in that room with the table.
Nobody close to Aresco expects him to stay quiet in retirement. He’s too outgoing, too friendly and too passionate not to call reporters and share his opinions. He won’t speak on behalf of the conference, but you can be sure he’ll still defend it. His career took him to the fanciest events and parties with the biggest names in sports. But at his heart, he was always the young man carrying bags of cement at a construction site, trying to build, thinking of the little guy.
“If you’re in this conference, make it the best it can be,” he said. “Create a good experience for your student-athletes and achieve something no one thought you could. I was lucky for 12 years, I had something to promote. I never threw a pass or hit a home run, but I always wanted to give voice to what they did.”
(Photo: Howard Smith / USA Today)
