Today the American Athletic Conference released the pairings for the 2014-'15 Men's Basketball Season. The announcement also included the dates and format for the conference tournament- which will be played at the XL Center in Hartford.
UConn will be playing Cincinnati, ECU, Memphis, USF, SMU, Temple, Tulane, and Tulsa at home and on the road- no word about Gampel/XL Center yet from the school. To complete the 18-game conference schedule, the Huskies will play UCF at home and Houston on the road (revenge!). With 11 teams in the conference, the AAC had to cut the round-robin format from last year. They were very smart, though, to make sure that UConn, Memphis, SMU and Cincinnati would play each other twice. Those teams will be the class of the conference, and except for Cincinnati only having to play potentially frisky Tulsa once, none of the top teams appear to have any sort of advantage over the others.
Also mentioned in the release were the dates and structure for the conference championship tournament. The tournament will run from Thursday, March 12th to Sunday, March 15th. The night of the Final would be the day that NCAA Tournament brackets are released. The entire tournament will be played on the ESPN family of networks.
All 11 teams will play in the conference tournament. On Thursday, the bottom six teams will play in the first round and the top five will receive a first-round bye. In four quarterfinal games, the 4 and 5-seed will play each other and the top three teams will face first-round winners. The tournament will proceed like a normal bracket from there concluding with the Final on Sunday.
Dates and times of conference games will be released at a later date.
GO HUSKIES!!