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NEWPORT, R.I. — The trappings of American inequity dot the landscape here, as even the 1-percenters can’t help but gawk at the looming mansions on the Cliff Walk owned by iconic American families. Amid this gilded setting, the American Athletic Conference has held its Media Days since the league’s inception five years ago. And it has spent that time balancing Rockefeller ambitions on a Bundy family budget, desperately seeking a way to launch itself out of college football’s middle class. On the field, the American Athletic Conference has acquitted itself well since the football iteration of the Big East collapsed. The AAC has made clear its aspirational desires, launching a persistent “P6” campaign to include itself in the top echelon of Power Five conferences in college sports. The AAC has shown in a small sample size that it can be intermittently competitive with the top leagues in college football. That includes two marquee bowl wins the past three seasons, with Houston toppling Florida State in the Peach Bowl after 2015 and undefeated UCF thumping Auburn in the same game last season. But to change the narrative on the field, the next step for the Artist Formerly Known As The Big East is to change the financial model off it. For all of AAC commissioner Mike Aresco’s stumping for the sport’s model to change to a Power Six, there’s no chance of that transcending empty rhetoric until the league’s financial revenues look more Rockefeller than Bundy. The league is wheezing through the final two seasons of a seven-year, $126 million television contract with ESPN that was essentially a hostage negation that doubled as a TV deal. The AAC, fresh off a spate of realignment departures, did the best it could at the time and signed on for short money to be more attractive this time around. For ESPN, it has proven a grand bargain for the quality and quantity of content. (Essentially, each major conference program in the Power Five gets more television revenue annually than all 12 teams in the AAC)......... https://sports.yahoo.com/aac-tv-deal-impact-future-college-football-rights-034901284.html