SSG College Football: American Athletic Conference Preview

The SSG College Football league, using Wolverine Studios Draft Day Sports: College Football 2020, kicks off with coaching hiring in February. It has real teams but fictional players and in order to give these fictional players a history the league actually began play with the 2014 season and quick-simmed five years of history to bring us to the start of the 2019 season which will played as a kind of a trial run through over the first 6 months of the year before the 2020 season starts, as it does in real life, in the late summer. To get you up to speed on how the college football landscape evolved over the past five years here is the second in a series of recaps looking at each conference.

The SSG American Athletic Conference

There is talk of the SSG College Football world looking to shuffle the deck over the next couple of seasons as conference realignment may be on the table.  Tops on the list, at least in the minds of the Big 12 is getting their conference back to twelve teams from it’s present total of ten.  If that happens, you can bet the number one team on the Big 12’s (or any other conference for that matter) wish list will be the SSG University of Central Florida Knights. The Knights are clearly the best team in the American Athletic Conference and one of the best teams in the nation. UCF has won a pair of National Titles while posting 2 undefeated seasons – in 2015 and 2017.  The Knights have never lost a bowl game in the modern SSG NCAA era and are 65-6 over the past five seasons.  They have only lost a single non-conference game in the past five years and beat SSG Ohio State in their only meeting, which occurred in 2015 playoff. SSG Memphis is the only American Athletic school besides UCF to win the conference title.  The Tigers did that in 2016 by beating a surprising SSG Temple squad in the championship game.  Temple is below .500 (20-21) in conference play the past five years but the Owls are also the only team to beat UCF twice in that span.  Included in those two upsets was a 41-31 victory over the Knights last season as losses to Temple and Houston derailed UCF’s bid for a third National Title.  UCF did get revenge on the Cougars for that regular season loss with a convincing victory in last season’s conference title game but their 11-2 record left them on the outside of the playoff picture and the Knights had to settle for being ranked 5th and beating Cal in the Cotton Bowl. Here are the conference standings in games played since 2014.   Next up: The SSG Conference USA preview.