IRVING, Texas – Commissioner Mike Aresco has announced the American Athletic Conference’s 88-game football schedule for the 2022 season, including the 44-game conference schedule.
 
Each of the 11 teams in The American will once again play eight conference games in 2022. The top two teams in the final single-division regular-season standings will meet Dec. 3 in the eighth American Athletic Conference Football Championship.
 
The schedule features six nonconference games against teams ranked in the top 25 of the final Associated Press poll of 2021 (No. 8 Notre Dame, No. 11 Ole Miss, No. 19 BYU, No. 20 NC State, No. 21 Arkansas).
 
A total of 17 of The American’s 44 nonconference games will be against Power 6 opponents or Notre Dame. Teams from The American will play five games against opponents from the ACC, four games each against SEC and Big 12 teams, three against the Big Ten and one against Notre Dame.
 
Teams in The American will have seven visits from power conference teams to their home stadiums – NC State at East Carolina (Sept. 3), Louisville at UCF (Sept. 9), Kansas at Houston (Sept. 17), Rutgers at Temple (Sept. 17), Georgia Tech at UCF (Sept. 24), Indiana at Cincinnati (Sept. 24) and TCU at SMU (Sept. 24).
 
Some highlights of the 2022 schedule include:
 

• A minimum of 40 conference-controlled regular-season games on either ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 or 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 Tulane at Houston on either Thursday, Sept. 29 or Friday, Sept. 30.
   
• A series of games available exclusively on ESPN+, the leading direct-to-consumer sports streaming service which has grown to more than 21.3 million subscribers in less than four years.


• One game will be selected for Black Friday (Nov. 25) among a group of three games in the final week of the regular season. The Black Friday selection will come from UCF-South Florida, Tulane-Cincinnati and Tulsa-Houston. That selection will be made by Oct. 3.
   
• The American Athletic Conference Football Championship, which has been broadcast on ABC in each of the last seven years, is scheduled for Dec. 3 and will be televised either on ABC or ESPN.

 
The American continued to make history in 2021 as Cincinnati reached the College Football Playoff Semifinals and finished the year ranked No. 4 in the final national polls. It marked the sixth time in eight seasons of the College Football Playoff era that The American was represented in the New Year’s Six and the fifth top-10 finish by an American Athletic Conference team in the league’s nine seasons. Cincinnati finished the 2021 regular season as the nation’s only unbeaten team, marking the fourth time in five years that The American sent an unbeaten team into Bowl Season.
 
Seven teams from The American were selected for bowl games, while league teams were a combined 3-1 in postseason games that were played. The conference also had three NCAA Consensus All-America selections (Cincinnati CB Ahmad Gardner, Houston CB Marcus Jones, South Florida RB Brian Battie), trailing only the SEC and Big Ten among FBS conferences.
 
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.