IRVING, Texas – Commissioner Mike Aresco has announced the American Athletic Conference’s 88-game football schedule for the 2021 season, including the 44-game conference schedule.
 
Each of the 11 teams in The American will once again play eight conference games in 2021. The top two teams in the final single-division regular-season standings will meet Dec. 4 in the seventh American Athletic Conference Football Championship.
 
The schedule features five nonconference games against teams ranked in the top 10 of the final Associated Press poll of 2020 and eight games against top-25 opponents (No. 2 Ohio State, No. 5 Notre Dame, No. 6 Oklahoma, No. 11 BYU, No. 12 Indiana, No. 13 Florida, No. 20 Oklahoma State).
 
A total of 16 of The American’s 44 nonconference games will be against Power 6 opponents or Notre Dame. Teams from The American will play four games each against opponents from the SEC and Big 12, three each from the ACC and Big Ten and two against Notre Dame.
 
Teams in The American will have five visits from power conference teams to their home stadiums – Oklahoma at Tulane, Florida at USF, South Carolina at East Carolina, Mississippi State at Memphis and Boston College at Temple. Additionally, Houston will face Texas Tech in the Texas Kickoff at NRG Stadium in Houston.
 
Some highlights of the 2021 schedule include:
 

• A minimum of 40 conference-controlled regular-season games on either ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU, including at least 20 games on either ABC, ESPN or ESPN2.
   
• A compelling slate of Thursday and Friday prime time conference games on ESPN Networks, beginning with Houston at Tulsa on Friday. Oct. 1.
   
• A series of games available exclusively on ESPN+, the leading direct-to-consumer sports streaming service which has grown to more than 12 million subscribers in less than three years.
   
• The annual War on I-4 matchup between USF and UCF will once again be showcased on an ESPN network the day after Thanksgiving (Friday, Nov. 26). A second Black Friday contest will be added when either the Cincinnati-East Carolina, Tulane-Memphis or Tulsa-SMU game is selected for the final Friday of the regular season. That selection will be made by Oct. 4.
   
• Navy’s Sept. 11 game against Air Force, which will commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, will be televised on CBS. The Dec. 11 Army-Navy game will also air on CBS.
   
• The American Athletic Conference Football Championship, which has been broadcast on ABC in each of the last six years, is scheduled for Dec. 4 and will be televised once again on ABC.

 
The American is coming off another banner season in 2020 as the league produced another top-10 team and New Year’s Six bowl participant as Cincinnati finished No. 8 in the final rankings following the Bearcats’ appearance in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl. It marked the fifth time in seven seasons of the College Football Playoff era that The American was represented in the New Year’s Six and the fourth top-10 finish by an American Athletic Conference team in the league’s eight seasons. The conference also had the winners of the Bednarik Award and Nagurski Trophy as the nation’s top defensive player (Tulsa LB Zaven Collins) and the Campbell Trophy as college football’s top scholar-athlete (Memphis QB Brady White).
 
Kickoff times and television designations for the first three weeks of the season, as well as the season-long weeknight games, will be finalized by June 1. The rest of the schedule will fall under the customary 12-day and six-day selection processes.