University of Cincinnati Director of Athletics John Cunningham was hell-bent on getting his school into one of the Power Five conferences. With college athletics seemingly changing by the minute, Cunningham wanted to make it happen as soon as possible.
After months of negotiating an exit fee with the American Athletic Conference, Cincinnati's home conference since 2013, Cunningham got it done.
Cincinnati and the AAC announced Friday that the school and the conference have agreed on a buyout that will allow the Bearcats to leave the AAC and begin competing in the Big 12 Conference on July 1 2023.
Cincinnati will leave the AAC a year earlier than its previously scheduled July 1, 2024, departure date.
In a statement released by Cincinnati early Friday, Cunningham spoke glowingly about the "accelerated timeline" and again referenced he and the Cincinnati athletic department's goal to "compete for championships on the first day" of Big 12 competition.
That timeline and the start of that competition was all about finding the right number, Cunningham told The Enquirer late Friday afternoon.
"It was always going to be about a certain dollar figure that made sense for both parties," he said.
That final negotiated buyout amount is $18 million, nearly double the exit fee outlined in the AAC's bylaws ($10 million). Cincinnati will pay the conference the $18 million over 14 years, $10 million in the first four years and the remaining $8 million over the following 10.
"It was amicable conversations the whole time," Cunningham said. "We had reasons to want to leave early. They had reasons to want to make some room for the other schools that are coming in. So it just made sense that it was going to happen. It just took some time to get to the place where the numbers made sense. But sometimes time has a way of bringing parties together, and that's what happened here."
The AAC needed to clear some room and do it quickly.
While members Cincinnati, Central Florida and Houston were looking to exit the conference, the six Conference USA schools – Charlotte, Florida Atlantic, North Texas, Rice, UAB and UTSA – set to replace them were looking to enter. The log jam forced both parties to move with a sense of urgency, which AAC Commissioner Mike Aresco highlighted in March.
Independent school BYU, which along with Cincinnati, UCF and Houston announced last September it was set to join the Big 12 in response to the departure of Oklahoma and Texas for the SEC, had already announced it would enter the Big 12 beginning in 2023.
All of this while Oklahoma and Texas have not yet given notice that they intend to exit for the SEC earlier than their initial announced departure date of July 1, 2025, when the Big 12’s grant of rights expires.
According to the Big 12's bylaws, if a school leaves early, it must pay back two years worth of revenue to the conference before it leaves. That would mean Oklahoma and Texas would have to pay around $75 million to the conference respectively.
As conferences continue to shuffle their decks, Cunningham must now shift his sights to shuffling the Bearcats' 2023-24 athletic schedules, particularly the one belonging to Luke Fickell and the two-time defending AAC champion Cincinnati football team.
"The one that we're probably most focused in on is football, just because that's usually done several years in advance," Cunningham said. "So you've got to be aware of what your schedule looks like and what the Big 12 schedule will look like coming in. So we're obviously aware of that and having conversations and had some preliminary conversations if this was going to happen and we were going to be able to leave early.
"Now, we know what the situation is and where we need to be. So we'll have to make some calls and just make sure that we get the football non-conference (schedule) figured out so we can make room for the Big 12 schedule."
As for Cincinnati's other marquee sport, men's basketball, Cunningham said the Bearcats are set to join the "best basketball conference in the country."
The Big 12 claimed each of the last two men's basketball national championships (Baylor in 2021 and Kansas in 2022). Big 12 perennial power Kansas, the winningest Division I program of all time, owns the NCAA record for the most consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances, earning a spot in the last 32 tournaments.
Cunningham said he's spoken to Cincinnati men's basketball coach Wes Miller about the growth that needs to happen for his program ahead of the move to the Big 12. The Bearcats finished 18-15 (7-11 in AAC play) and failed to earn a NCAA Tournament berth last season, Miller's first at Cincinnati.
"I think we actually performed well last year, considering he had to put that team together in a short period of time," Cunningham said of Miller. "We always talked about it was a grouping of players that got along really well and played really hard all year. But at the same time, he didn't have a full opportunity to really get that team where it needed to be just from a practice standpoint. He'd talk about that all the time.
"Just the number of games we were playing in the year just didn't allow him to have the practice time that he really wanted. He used to say that if we had a period of time where we could just practice and not have to play a game, we'd get better. That tended to be how it went throughout the season. But when we piled up those games, especially because we had a couple COVID situations and we just went back to back to back to back to back, we got a little bit worn down in my opinion. We just didn't get that practice time in that we needed."
Though Cincinnati has an expedited Big 12 entry date, several uncertainties remain about the upcoming move. Most notably the long-term financial impact the move will have on the Bearcats and who will oversee Cincinnati's arrival. Current Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby is stepping down from his post later this year once a new commissioner is appointed.
The financial landscape for the Big 12 and its members will become more clear once the conference finalizes its new television deal. The conference's current contract with Fox and ESPN runs through the 2024-25 season. The conference's members each received about $40 million in TV revenue last fiscal year. Comparatively, Cincinnati currently receives about $7 million annually in TV revenue as a member of the AAC.
Regardless of the unknowns, Cunningham, who was hired to oversee Cincinnati's athletics in December 2019, had a vision, and that vision was for Cincinnati to have a seat reserved at the head of college athletics' main table. In a little more than a year, Cunningham will lead the Bearcats out of the Group of Five shadows and into the bright lights of the Power Five conferences.
"We're just excited to get this thing going," he said. "We're one year away."