AAC Expands Revenue Focus as NIL and Realignment Reshape College Sports

The American Athletic Conference (AAC) has launched American RISE Ventures, a new business division aimed at enhancing revenue generation for the benefit of its member institutions.

According to a conference press release, the new unit “will lead all aspects of the league’s revenue generation, sponsorship strategy, media rights, brand partnerships, technology, emerging business ventures, and long-term commercial innovation across the conference.”

Bryan Calka has simultaneously been appointed Chief Commercial Officer of the AAC and will play a significant role in supporting RISE Ventures. Calka brings significant expertise from prior roles in revenue generation for the New York Yankees, New York Islanders, Barclays Center, and the Professional Fighters League.

The strategic investment comes amid a momentous shift in collegiate athletics, as direct athletic compensation from schools to athletes is rapidly approaching. 

NIL revenue sharing will begin this July, but it remains indeterminate in what form it will take place. If Judge Claudia Wilken grants final approval to the novel House v. NCAA settlement, each institution that opts into the settlement will be constrained to a maximum revenue sharing allotment — effectively a salary cap, schools would be limited to spending $20.5 million for the 2025-26 season across all sports. 

Without an approved settlement, revenue sharing will be subject to state law regulation. 

In any case, Group of Five Conferences, like the AAC, will continue to face significant challenges in their ability to compete with power conference peers that enjoy more revenue generation capacity through more valuable media rights and sponsorship valuations. 

As college athletes’ talents become increasingly valuable, and recruitment and retention are increasingly predicated on compensation, being able to pay as close to the NIL revenue sharing cap as possible is imperative for fielding a program worthy of national relevance. The divide between the haves and have-nots in college sports is anticipated to grow in the wake of direct payment to student-athletes. 

The AAC’s current media rights deal generates approximately $7 million annually per school, a stark contrast to its geographic power four counterpart, the Big 12, whose media deal nets roughly $32 million per institution starting in 2025-26.

Compared to super conferences like the Big Ten, the AAC nets only a small fraction of the $75 million distributed to each school annually through the landmark Big Ten broadcasting rights agreement.

In the wake of widespread conference realignment, the AAC has seen itself as one of the biggest impacted by the poaching of Group of Five schools that have achieved national success and prominence by power conferences that can offer more financial resources.

UConn left for the Big East in 2020; UCF, Houston, and Cincinnati left for the Big 12 in 2022; and most recently, SMU departed for the ACC in 2023. 

The AAC has already taken proactive steps to maximize the value of the brands it has been able to retain. The conference will require every institution, except Army and Navy (which are precluded from providing athlete NIL payments due to federal law), to provide a minimum of $10 million in revenue-sharing funds over the next three years. 

While the revenue sharing minimum requires schools to provide some investment in their direct athletic payment, the number is far below the virtually universal commitment of power conference schools to paying the full cap.

Empowering schools with new revenue streams at the conference level through RISE Ventures will ideally reduce the burden of finding ways to compensate revenue-generating athletes for AAC institutions.