Written by Matt Zemek at Bloguin
The American is enjoying a very successful college football season. Saturday night, a city known for its urban sprawl will appropriately host the game that might mean more to the AAC than any other in 2015.
Just chew on that last sentence for a bit. There’s a lot to take in. First, Houston is the city which will host the game in question. The city is a representation of American sprawl. The participants in Saturday’s game are the homestanding Cougars, unbeaten and undaunted, and the once-beaten Memphis Tigers. That much you already knew.
However, what is this business about Memphis-Houston meaning more to The American than any other game in 2015? Won’t the league’s first conference championship game mean more? Won’t Memphis-Temple next week mean even more, given that it’s a cross-division matchup?
Good questions. Let’s explain.
The notion of “sprawl” is part of it.
American sprawl is something I’ve personally seen in Phoenix, the city of my birth. I haven’t been in Houston beyond the airport, but people who live there tell me it’s a very spread-out city. This basic idea of being hard to contain, spilling out in all sorts of directions, is the perfect way to capture Memphis-Houston, a game which might not mean as much to the AAC in 2015 as that first league title game on Dec. 5, but which might mean more to this conference in the long run, five or 10 or 15 years from now.
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