Just five FBS programs have posted eight or more wins in each season of the College Football Playoff era. You can probably guess four of them: Alabama, Clemson, Georgia and Oklahoma, who collectively have made up 19 of the 28 Playoff berths across the past seven years.
The fifth? That would be the program that is on the verge of becoming the most high-profile Group of 5 outfit in the country after the Big 12 formally adds four teams on Friday as expected.
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Memphis has gone 65-26 since 2014 and has never gone worse than 5-3 in American Athletic Conference play. The Tigers have done this through three coaching regimes, as Ryan Silverfield is in his second season at the helm after predecessors Justin Fuente (Virginia Tech) and Mike Norvell (Florida State) parlayed their success into greener pastures in the ACC.
Yet in the short term, the program looks as though it is about to become the biggest loser in the game of musical chairs that is conference realignment, as BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF are Big 12-bound.
In the long term, school brass isn’t so sure that’s the case.
“It’s obviously a challenging time, and it’s such a time of dramatic change across the national landscape, but we are well-positioned,” Memphis athletic director Laird Veatch told The Athletic. “We are in a better position than we have ever been from a competitive standpoint, an institutional standpoint, the growth equality of the city. We just have a lot to be proud of. And the biggest thing I want our fan base to know is that we need to continue to push forward because change is not over. It’s going to continue, and with change will come opportunity.”
Veatch laughs when he remembers that he has not even been the AD for two full years at Memphis. Such is the whirlwind that has engulfed this sport, and this world, during that time period. He does, however, echo what seems to be a growing sentiment among Group of 5 leaders, believing that there may be an opportunity to re-think what the next steps should be, rather than just simply replacing the departing AAC teams with three more schools from smaller conferences. (BYU, an independent, will be the lone non-AAC addition to the Big 12.)
“We are well-positioned,” Memphis athletic director Laird Veatch said. (Courtesy of University of Florida Athletics)Memphis might not come out and say this, but there is no concern about the football program falling to the wayside the way UConn football did when the Huskies became the last team standing during the previous major wave of realignment.
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A former Kansas State linebacker under Bill Snyder, Veatch has spent the bulk of his 22-year administrative career working at Big 12 schools past (Missouri), soon-to-be-past (Texas) and present (Iowa State, Kansas State). So he knows what that conference wants, even if Memphis, for reasons beyond its control, doesn’t quite measure up yet from a numbers standpoint.
The school’s enrollment of roughly 22,000 students is more than 10,000 fewer than the smallest of the Big 12 additions, BYU (and one-third the size of the biggest, UCF). The Memphis television market ranked 51st in the latest Nielsen DMA rankings, 15 spots below the lowest of the Big 12 additions, Cincinnati (and 43 spots below the biggest, Houston).
Conversely, Memphis’ average attendance of 36,545 fans from 2015-19 surpasses the average of Houston (32,378) and is comparable to the average of UCF (38,103) during that time period, and it is more than Cincinnati’s school-record turnout (35,984) from 2019. The school also sits less than 500 miles from Big 12 headquarters, roughly half the distance of every non-Houston addition to the conference.
The dynamics surrounding Memphis are unique. First-generation college students make up 34 percent of its student body. Pell Grant students make up 44 percent. Female students account for more than 60 percent, and minority students account for more than 50 percent.
The reality of the situation is attractive to potential suitors, as is the fact that FedEx, AutoZone and International Paper are located in the city, along with Nike’s biggest distribution center.
“There is definitely big corporate support, but I think diversity is another big selling point that we have, particularly in this day and age when people are truly waking up to the value of diversity and what it could bring to organizations, to schools, to communities,” Veatch said. “This is a place where over half of our student body is people of color and well over half of the population in this area is people of color. I was talking to the chair of our Chamber of Commerce, who happens to be on our staff at the university, and he had mentioned that we are No. 1 in the country in terms of Black tech employees.
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“Those are the type of opportunities (available) when you’re engaged with a place like this, on top of our Civil Rights history and all the other educational opportunities. I think it’s a unique opportunity to invest in and benefit from.”
The Tigers are the center of the city of Memphis in a way that most colleges in markets of comparable size are not, with Louisville and Columbus being the only real rivals in that department. Southern football passion could be fruitful for what was, until now, a rather homogeneous conference, geographically speaking.
Silverfield, like most football coaches in-season, pleaded ignorance to his conference getting poached when he was asked about it during his Monday press conference.
“If it’s out there, that’s great, so be it and we’ll deal with it when the time comes,” the second-year Tigers head coach told reporters.
National and local fervor surrounding Memphis’ men’s basketball program is at an all-time high, with hometown native and alum Penny Hardaway having signed the No. 1 recruiting class.
Two weeks ago, ahead of this latest round of Big 12 news, Veatch and his staff announced a strategic and facilities master plan titled #MemphisRising, a vision that includes renovations to the football complex and creating an on-campus hub for student-athletes.
“The timing is fortunate in many ways,” Veatch said. “They say luck is when preparation meets opportunity, and this vision and the direction of the vision, how we put it together, has been coming along for some time now and really fits right into what I think the future of college athletics is going to need Memphis to be. I think we’re all excited about it.
“It’s going to take some significant investment from a lot of people, but there is definitely that kind of capacity here and people that care. We laid out the vision, now we’ve just got to go make it happen.”
(Photo of Memphis running back Gabriel Rogers catching a pass against Nicholls State defensive back Jodran Jackson on Saturday: Justin Ford / USA Today)
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