AAC presidents vote to accept Army as football-only member beginning 2024-25

The 2023 conference realignment cycle is not quite over yet as news broke Wednesday morning that Army is set to head to the AAC, joining rival Navy.

According to Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports, AAC leadership voted to add the Black Knights on Tuesday evening: “AAC presidents voted Tuesday night to accept Army into the conference starting in 2024-25, sources tell Yahoo Sports,” he tweeted on Wednesday.

Dellenger added some interesting details on the addition too. He says that they would join as a “football-only” school and will play Navy in what’s considered a non-conference game, even though the two schools are now in the same league. Per Dellenger:

“Army would continue playing Navy on traditional date in a game that would not count in conference standings (if Army & Navy meet in the league title game, they’d play again the next week).”

That’s an interesting scheduling quagmire. In the very unlikely scenario that Army and Navy are the two best teams in the AAC in a given season, they’d meet for the first time in the AAC title game before playing each other AGAIN in the traditional Army-Navy game that annually takes place the week after conference championship games.

So, by the start of the next sports calendar, Army will be an official member of the AAC in football, while their game against Army will remain in its normal slot.

Other AAC expansion

In his reports, Ross Dellenger noted that talks between Army and the AAC go back months and both sides have wanted to make this deal happen since the start of the football season. Really, you can trace the timeline back to the SMU departure, who agreed to leave the AAC for the ACC, leaving the AAC with an odd-numbered 13 teams. Logically, they wanted to round it out to 14 and Army made sense on the football side.

As of 2022, the league had 11 teams but then lost Cincinnati, UCF and Houston to the Big 12, leaving them at eight teams. So the AAC went out and pillaged the Conference USA for six new teams: Florida Atlantic, UAB, Charlotte, North Texas, Rice and UTSA. That raised the total to 14 before SMU snuck out.

Now, Army is in on football to make it two touchdowns worth of teams in the AAC. By next fall, the league will have half of its football programs who have joined in the last two seasons.