National Football Foundation

After becoming the commissioner of the Big East Conference in August 2012, Mike Aresco reconstituted the league into the American Athletic Conference in 2013. He successfully led the league for its first 11 years before retiring in May 2024.
 
His highly successful tenure produced four NCAA championship teams, a College Football Playoff semifinalist, four New Year’s Six bowl champions, two NCAA Men’s Final Four teams and six Women’s Final Four teams in its first decade. Aresco secured two monumental media rights agreements with ESPN, ensuring The American would have prominent and consistent exposure on the industry leader in sports television while providing the conference financial stability for the membership.
 
The American’s success contributed to the major shifts in the national landscape with UCF, Cincinnati and Houston, all of which scored New Year’s Six and NCAA men’s basketball tournament wins under The American’s banner, joining the Big 12 and SMU moving to the ACC for the 2024 season. Aresco negotiated fair and sensible separation agreements with the departing members, but more importantly, orchestrated a strategic expansion of his own by adding like-minded universities (UAB, Charlotte, Florida Atlantic, North Texas, Rice, UTSA as well as Army West Point as a football-playing member) to further concentrate The American’s presence in key cities and regions.
 
Aresco has been a prominent leader within the College Football Playoff and was instrumental in ensuring that all 10 FBS conferences would have an annual opportunity to challenge for a New Year’s Six bowl bid — a move that paid off for The American with seven New Year’s Six bowls in the first nine years of the system. He played a key role in the expansion of the Playoff to 12 teams, including automatic bids for six league champions, and he served in a leadership role on a number of College Football Playoff committees, including the strategic planning, television and site selection committees and more recently, the committee to select the organization’s next executive director.
 
Aresco came to the conference from CBS Sports where he was Executive Vice President, Programming.