IRVING, Texas – Commissioner Mike Aresco has announced the American Athletic Conference’s 112-game football schedule, including the 56-game conference schedule, as the conference begins its first season of competition as a 14-team league in 2023.
 
The schedule will send some of the nation's top teams to American Athletic Conference stadiums in 2023 as conference schools play host to Alabama, Oklahoma, Ole Miss and Miami (Fla.) among others. A minimum of 40 conference-controlled regular-season games will be on ESPN's linear platforms, including at least 20 games on either ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 or ESPNU.
 
The nonconference portion of the schedule features nine games against teams ranked in the top 25 of the final Associated Press poll of 2022, including six of the top eight teams and three of the four teams that reached the College Football Playoff. Twenty-one nonconference games will be against teams from autonomous conferences or Notre Dame.
 
Teams from The American will play six games each against opponents from the SEC and Big 12, four games against the Big Ten, two each against the ACC and Pac-12 and one against Notre Dame.
 
Each of the 14 teams in The American will play eight conference games in 2023. The top two teams in the final single-division regular-season standings will meet Dec. 2 in the ninth American Athletic Conference Football Championship.
 
The American welcomes UAB, Charlotte, Florida Atlantic, North Texas, Rice and UTSA to its ranks in 2023. They will join continuing members East Carolina, Memphis, Navy, South Florida, SMU, Temple, Tulane and Tulsa to comprise a conference that will continue to compete for perennial New Year's Six bowls and College Football Playoff appearances.
 
Some highlights of the 2023 schedule include:
 

• A compelling slate of Thursday and Friday prime time conference games on ESPN Networks, beginning with Navy at Memphis on Thursday, Sept. 14. The American will have a conference game in prime time in at least seven weeks of the 2023 season. 
   
• A series of games available exclusively on ESPN+, the leading direct-to-consumer sports streaming service which has grown to more than 24.9 million subscribers in less than five years.
   
• Two games will be selected for Black Friday (Nov. 24) among a group of four games in the final week of the regular season. The Black Friday selections will come from Tulsa-East Carolina, Memphis-Temple, UAB-North Texas and UTSA-Tulane. Those selections will be made by Oct. 9.
   
• The American Athletic Conference Football Championship, which has been broadcast on ABC in each of the last eight years, is scheduled for Dec. 2 and will be televised either on ABC or ESPN.

 
The American continued to make history in 2022 as Tulane completed the best one-year turnaround in major college football history, as the Green Wave capped a 12-2 season with a Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic victory against USC and a final national ranking of No. 9. It marked the seventh time in nine seasons of the College Football Playoff era that The American was represented in the New Year’s Six, the fourth win by an American team in the league's 10-year history and the sixth top-10 finish by an American Athletic Conference team.
 
Seven teams from The American were selected for bowl games, while league teams went 4-3 in postseason play.
 
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.