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While much attention has been paid to the University of Houston’s move to the Big 12 Conference, another local university is also making a significant conference move come July 1.
Rice University is moving from the Conference USA athletic conference to the American Athletic Conference — the conference UH is leaving to join the Big 12. Rice initially accepted its invitation to join the AAC in October 2021, a move that will become official in less than a month.
The decision makes sense for Rice on a number of levels, said Joe Karlgaard, Rice University’s director of athletics, recreation and lifetime fitness. Rice is currently the only private institution in CUSA and competes against schools that are mostly unfamiliar to its fanbase, he said. Rice aligns better academically with the AAC, which allows the school to compete against more recognizable universities for its fans, such as Southern Methodist University, Tulane University and the University of Tulsa.
RIce will also get national exposure on linear television as a result of the move. A minimum of 40 AAC football games and 60 AAC basketball games will be broadcast on ESPN’s primary television networks, which include ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU. Additionally, nearly every conference-controlled game in all sports will appear either on an ESPN network or on ESPN+, according to the conference’s media rights deal with ESPN.
“The exposure to linear television is important to us,” Karlgaard said. “It may be on Thursday or Friday, it may be on ESPNU and not the flagship ESPN, but it’s still an opportunity that we haven’t had for the last 10 years.”
While Rice has already completed many steps in preparation for the move, one of the more complicated processes is upgrading the university’s broadcasting standards to be aligned with the AAC, Karlgaard said. That includes buying new equipment, setting up new camera angles and having different standards for replays, as well as making sure production teams are staffed with experienced professionals.
“It’s making sure that we have experienced producers in the truck or in our control room and that we’ve got enough people working cameras who are experienced,” he said. “Those are things that show up. You don’t necessarily notice them if they’re great, but you do notice them if they’re not good.”
Rice is expected to see a boost in media rights revenue as a result of the conference move. The AAC signed a 12-year, $1 billion media rights agreement with ESPN in 2019, about four times what the conference was making previously, according to Sports Business Journal. Rice, along with the five other schools joining the conference, will start by earning $2 million in TV revenue, working their way up to the $4 million to $6 million AAC schools receive in TV contributions, according to Front Office Sports. CUSA schools received about $1 million to $3 million in TV revenue.
The university also expects to see increases in overall revenue from ticket sales — especially season ticket sales — and sponsorships, Karlgaard said. The athletics department will receive additional investments from the university to help the department take advantage of the new opportunities in ticket sales and sponsorships. Karlgaard did not disclose how much more revenue he expects the athletics department to earn as a result of the conference move.
Rice plans to reinvest the added revenue back into the athletics department, much of it in the form of additional staff in order to align more closely with other AAC schools, Karlgaard said. The department has about 150 staff members, and Karlgaard said he expects the staff to increase to between 175 and 200 members over the next 18 months. While the exact distribution of the additional staff has not yet been determined, the department will hire many new staff members in roles that support student athletes, such as those focused on mental health, student-athlete experiences, post-college transition, nutrition and technology.
“We realize to be competitive — because we don’t want to just come in and participate, we want to be competitive — we’re going to have to expand,” Karlgaard said.
The added revenue will also be used to cover travel expenses, mostly from the need to charter travel for student athletes, Karlgaard said. For example, in CUSA, even though Rice was traveling to more rural schools, the conference had an ideal travel schedule for basketball season. In the AAC, the universities are easier to get to via commercial transportation, but the conference has an irregular schedule. The university plans to invest in travel so that its athletes can be back on campus and in class no matter how the schedule lands.
While the move to the AAC will benefit fans, athletes and the athletics department, it ultimately creates greater national recognition for Rice. Despite Rice being ranked No. 15 nationwide on U.S. News & World Report's Best Colleges rankings and No. 6 on the 2023 Best Colleges in America list from Niche, Karlgaard said the farther from Houston one goes, the less recognizable the university is. Being in the AAC changes that.
“We are very well known in the city of Houston, we’re pretty well known within the state of Texas, but as you start to get past the borders of the state, we become less and less well known,” Karlgaard said. “The cliche is athletics serves as the front porch to the institution. I think joining the (AAC) really brings that concept to bear for us in a way that we haven’t seen in quite some time.”
