HARTFORD — They make up the strangest league, the 11 members of the American Athletic Conference. Their roster of coaches looks like the Island Of Misfit Programs—Kelvin Sampson? Jeff Lebo? Tubby Smith?—and the teams themselves are all schools that couldn’t find a chair when the music stopped and the power conferences were put together.
The league is one of the more ungainly beasts produced by the headlong evolution of college basketball into the monster that ate March. The same forces that put Maryland in the Big 10, and created the New York Life ACC Tournament made inevitable conferences like the American, which at least is possessed of some synergy between actual geography and the name of the league.