The AAC was recently raided by the Big 12, with UCF, Cincinnati and Houston announcing plans to join the conference soon.

However, the AAC and commissioner Mike Aresco didn’t stand pat. Instead, the league went out and added 6 new schools to replace the 3 that were leaving.

On Thursday morning, the league officially announced the addition of UAB, Charlotte, FAU, North Texas, Rice and UTSA:

“I am extremely pleased to welcome these six outstanding universities to the American Athletic Conference,” said Aresco in the release. “This is a strategic expansion that accomplishes a number of goals as we take the conference into its second decade. We are adding excellent institutions that are established in major cities and have invested in competing at the highest level. We have enhanced geographical concentration which will especially help the conference’s men’s and women’s basketball and Olympic sports teams. And we will continue to provide valuable inventory to our major media rights partner, ESPN, which will feature our members on the most prominent platforms in sports media. Additionally, we increase the value in live content options for CBS Sports, which features selected men’s basketball games from the conference.”

No formal date has been set for the schools to join the AAC as of yet.

All 6 of the new AAC schools currently play in Conference USA, so it’s a huge blow to that league. We’ll see what happens with realignment moving forward.