AAC Commissioner Shares Important Brand Decision for Tulane Green Wave Conference
In the Group of Five, American Athletic Conference commissioner Tim Pernetti has made the conference stand out on a national level, heightening the brand recognition for the Tulane Green Wave coinciding with the football team’s success.
Today’s era of college football, particularly with the infusion of NIL, requires acceptance and proactivity toward marketing and brand awareness.
That’s critical for a league that’s a product of tumultuous conference realignment in the early 2010s, with the Big East splitting into two—the non-football one that purchased the former name and the American.
Tulane football was left behind in the last wave of realignment that saw the Big 12 poach the Houston Cougars, Cincinnati Bearcats, and UCF Knights from the AAC. Although the conference suffered a significant loss, the G5 league gained national attention as a competitive league to watch.
American commissioner Tim Pernetti took over for Mike Aresco prior to the 2024 college football season and was tasked with keeping his core members just three months into his tenure when the Pac-12 extended an invite to the Green Wave, Memphis Tigers, USF Bulls and UTSA Roadrunners.
While Pernetti was successful in those efforts, realignment will happen again, and it’s important to keep the foundational football teams content to remain by emphasizing national recognition.
Pernetti has an impressive background in the media side of the business after starting his career as a programming executive at ABC Sports. That likely played into Pernetti’s branding strategy for the American conference he shared on the Next Up podcast with Adam Breneman.
As merely a decade-old conference, the AAC is still a new brand, and Pernetti felt that the acronym served less justice than calling it the American.
“This brand is a baby; it’s still in its infancy,” Pernetti said. “This conference has been around for 14 years, and I thought about it a lot even during the interview process—the American Athletic Conference, and the first thing I thought to myself was, athletic. This is a college conference: Atlantic Coast Conference, Big 12 Conference, Southeastern Conference. Maybe we should think about how to shape this around something that is meaningful and has broad-based appeal.”
Pernetti and the hosts had the consensus that the word “American” is the best conference branding name to have. After recognizing the power of the word for spreading a national footprint, Pernetti got to work with a consultant on a brand study.
“We had hundreds of people on campuses participate in this just to understand what it meant and what makes sense. We asked, what does the brand mean? We got a hundred different answers, and it occurred. It was time to sort of narrow it, better define it, build the tenets of what it means, and simplify even how we call it. I know you're calling some of our games on CBS Sports Network. I'm going to be on our media partners this offseason to stop using AAC and calling it the American Conference.
It may seem like a minor tweak, but Pernetti's media background gives credence to the value of the decision. His process of consulting and doing research with students on campuses is a smart means of assessing the true awareness of the American brand and how it translates to the important connection with students and fanbases.
"It is intentional because we want it to be understandable," Pernetti said. "We want people to know what it means, and we want it to have impact when it's said. We have a great word to start with, and we're just going to build around that.”
While Tulane football focuses on a path to the College Football Playoff, it's crucial to have that recognition on a national stage-and they're well-positioned for that marketing within Pernetti's American conference.
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Maddy Hudak is the deputy editor for Tulane on Sports Illustrated and the radio sideline reporter for their football team. Maddy is an alumnus of Tulane University, and graduated in 2016 with a degree in psychology. She went on to obtain a Master of Legal Studies while working as a research coordinator at the VA Hospital, and in jury consulting. During this time, Maddy began covering the New Orleans Saints with SB Nation, and USA Today. She moved to New Orleans in 2021 to pursue a career in sports and became Tulane's sideline reporter that season. She enters her fourth year with the team now covering the program on Sports Illustrated, and will use insights from features and interviews in the live radio broadcast. You can follow her on X at @MaddyHudak_94, or if you have any questions or comments, she can be reached via email at maddy.hudak1@gmail.com