The American losing 4 head coaches to power conferences being seen as positive

The American Conference football title game on Dec. 5 will have a bizarre backdrop.

Tulane and North Texas will meet in New Orleans for a spot in the College Football Playoff. Both coaches have done tremendous jobs at their respective schools and have positioned their teams as two of the best in the Group of Five.

Eric Morris (North Texas) and Jon Sumrall (Tulane) also have signed deals to coach other teams next season.

Morris was announced last week as Oklahoma State's newest coach, while Sumrall was unveiled Dec. 1 as Florida's. Making it even more absurd was the fact that Sumrall took part in the American Conference title game coaches news conference while in Gainesville.

He left that news conference, where he answered questions about his job as Tulane's coach, and immediately went to another news conference, where he answered questions about his job as Florida's coach.

"The biggest difficult (one) is: When do you sleep?" Sumrall said.

The American is losing four coaches to power conferences, with USF's Alex Golesh heading to Auburn and Memphis' Ryan Silverfield now at Arkansas. Massive turnover was inevitable with the sheer number of power conference openings in a wild 2025 cycle, and there's major overhaul coming to the American Conference.

Still, it has celebrated the success of its coaches and touted their credentials as they move on.

"If you'd given me the choice, and I could wave a magic wand and make the decision, I'd want to keep all four of those guys in the conference," commissioner Tim Pernetti said Dec. 1. "For sure. For as long as we possibly could. But that's not a reality of this business. I think it's a positive for the American to see the type of coaching talent we have inside the four walls of the league and the opportunities that are being presented to these coaches."

While the American and the Group of Five as a whole have had plenty of players transfer to power conference programs, Pernetti said he's excited to see the way other conferences are viewing its coaches as well.

"I know how everybody views the American, the fact that three of our coaches are leaving for SEC jobs, one is leaving for a Big 12 job," he said. "People are viewing the American as a place that has a lot of talent in the coaching ranks."

Almost everyone across college athletics has agreed that the calendar is an issue. Early signing day is Dec. 3, so coaches like Sumrall and Morris are balancing two jobs at the same time that require nonstop attention. Coaches like Golesh and Silverfield have three days to keep an entire recruiting class together, while other programs face the prospect of not even having a full-time coach on signing day.

Morris and Sumrall will continue to coach North Texas and Tulane, respectively, through the postseason. That's a different situation than the highly publicized divorce between Lane Kiffin and Ole Miss, which Morris alluded to during his news conference.

"Somebody's got to get all this stuff under control," Morris said. "It makes no sense at any level that we're sitting here talking about people that are about to be in the College Football Playoff, a team, and their coach isn't going to be there to help them get through the whole entire season. It's not sustainable. There's so many things that are not sustainable right now in what we're doing."

Reach sports writer Jonah Dylan at [email protected] or on X @thejonahdylan.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: How American is handling losing 4 head coaches to power conferences