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ASUN-WAC Football Partnership Formally Rebrands As The United Athletic Conference

Entering its third year as a formal football partnership but first as a single entity, the United Athletic Conference now fully operates like a single-sport conference with an independent budget, policies and governing documents. The group will recognize its own league champion and at-large FCS playoffs automatic qualifier under a singular conference banner beginning with the 2023 football season.

In my mind, it could be a tough conference.

This should be a competitive conference for sure...using the 2022 end of season Sagarin ratings the following are rough estimates of the strength:

United:

Avg D1 rank: 177
Avg Rating: 46
Avg SOS rank: 173

There are about 130 FBS/P5 teams in D1 so subtract 130 from the avg D1 Rank to give an idea of where in FCS this ranks. Note UTGRV will be starting football but they do get Texas to recruit and looks like a solid coaching staff.

The Avg Rating of 46 would have been 4th behind only MVFC (56), Big Sky (53) and Southern (48). CAA and Ivy are just behind by one point.

Following is how each part of United stacks ups using the 2022 data (only for the teams that will be part of United):


ASUN/WAC:

Avg D1 rank: 174/179
Avg Rating: 47/45 (UNA pulls ASUN avg down)
Avg SOS rank: 171/175

The team ranks based on Avg Rating follows:

Rank Rating SOS
APU 151 52.66 196
UCA 159 50.93 166
ACU 162 49.50 179
EKU 166 48.79 164
SFA 177 45.56 169
SUU 179 44.80 180
Tarleton 185 43.44 201
UTU 192 42.36 147
UNA 218 34.60 158

Given our difficulty in beating EKU and Tarleton there will be plenty of tough games.

So subtract 130 and no team in this
conference will rank in the top 20.

Uphill climb for national respect…

not excited