(Photo Courtesy: USA Today Sports)

This past week, Crystal Ball Run has given you an all-encompassing look at college football’s newest conference, “The American.” We’ve discussed key players, the league’s bizarre scheduling quirks and even the biggest and most exciting games to mark on your calendar.

And today it’s time to complete our look-ahead to the 2013 season in the American. Later we’ll be making our conference championship picks, and below we’ve listed our projected All-Conference picks.  

Please note that all players are listed by the class which they will be entering during the 2013 season, but all stats are from the 2012 season.

Enjoy, and as always feel free to let us know what you think of our selections in the comments section below. Also feel free to make fun of us when the actual All-Conference teams are selected in December.

Texas A&M has big plans for the redevelopment of its legendary home, Kyle Field.

A&M is pouring $450 million into eye-popping improvements that will make its home field the biggest in the SEC

But Sam Torn, one of the chairs of the redevelopment committee for the stadium, revealed in an interview with TexAgs.com published on Wednesday that the Aggies have more devious intentions than simply building a nice stadium:

It’s a fact of life in any conference: You’re going to have to travel at some point.

Now, some leagues have teams that don’t travel much at all save for the conference away games. Those teams are big enough that they don’t have to hit the road, or are very selective about the non-conference tilts they do play away from home.

But with this latest round of realignment, some teams are going to have to travel more—a lot more.

This is the case with the American Athletic Conference. The American stretches from Connecticut to Texas, and covers eight states currently. It is spread out almost as far for football as the old Western Athletic Conference was.

Here at Crystal Ball Run, we wanted to see who has to travel the farthest this season? Which school’s fans might be racking up the frequent flier miles to go see their team? So we looked at the schedules for everyone, pulled out their road games and used mapping software to cover the distance from campus to the opponent’s stadium for each road game. Mileage listed is in driving miles from campus to stadium as opposed to the closest airport. The list is presented from shortest aggregate travel distance to longest travel distance.

The American Athletic Conference exists in a sort of a netherworld. A mashup of the remaining football members of the old Big East Conference plus newcomers from the last iteration of Conference USA, the American is a conference born out of this age of intercollegiate athletics: the age where dollars trumped old alliances.

In fact, the American itself is not fully formed, as the version of the conference that sets off on this new direction on July 1 will not be the league in permanence, as Rutgers (Big Ten) and Louisville (Atlantic Coast Conference) depart for supposedly greener pastures after this season and East Carolina, Tulsa and Tulane arrive to replace those departing members.

Some of the challenges that the league faces can be seen in the scheduling philosophies, with the 2013 schedules being an interesting mix of teams that were in a one-time BCS qualifying league and teams that were outsiders.

The question though, is this: What is the strength of schedule, from most difficult to least difficult, for the 2013 member of the American?

The American will play an eight game conference schedule, which means that the conference schedules are by nature unbalanced, as each team will miss one other school in the conference. So the nature of the missed opponent has been examined, as well as taking a look at non-conference opponents and where those non conference games will take place.

Over the course of a calendar year, the month of May is essentially the only downtime a college football player gets. Falls are reserved for game days and prep, which immediately roll into bowl season and winter workouts, which becomes spring ball, and eventually summer camp. Therefore, it’s these pristine few days in May where a college football player gets to kick his feet back and relax.

And across the sport, different players use their free time in completely different ways.

Last year, several of USC’s players used the month off to take a mission trip down to Haiti, while in 2013, A.J. McCarron and Johnny Manziel are planning a trip of their own, of the “bro” variety. Things aren’t nearly as exciting at Texas Tech where new head coach Kliff Kingsbury isn’t worried about his players escaping to tropical locales, as much as he’s just terrified that they’re going to get fat during their downtime.

(Photo Courtesy: USA Today Sports)

With a name change from the “Big East” to the “American” it is this writer’s hope that along with a dead football conference, the bad, “Big Least” jokes are dead as well. As Louisville proved in last year’s Sugar Bowl, there is still plenty of good football being played in this conference, and coming off 10 and nine-win seasons respectively, Cincinnati and Rutgers proved this league wasn’t a one-trick pony in 2012 either.

And along with good overall football, there is plenty of quality, top-flight talent on these rosters as well. It showed in this past NFL Draft where schools that weren’t even bowl eligible like UConn had multiple draft picks (four, in the Huskies case) and where a slew of talented returning players should make these clubs even better in 2013. Not to mention that a group of big-name transfers should only bolster these rosters and make the overall quality of football in the American quite competitive this fall.

Yes, the “American” may be a new football conference, but believe us, there are plenty of names you’ll know when these teams take the field this fall.

Here are several to keep an eye on:

What we once knew as the Big East was kicked around and plundered during the conference realignment craziness. Now that the power leagues appear to have hit the pause button on all the shifting, the members of the newly minted American Athletic Conference are ready to put the focus back on the field, according to SBNation's Mark Ennis, who joined CBR's Allen Kenney for a podcast to preview the upcoming season in The American.

Mark and Allen cover:

*The national championship aspirations of the Louisville Cardinals and their Heisman hopeful quarterback Teddy Bridgewater.

*Central Florida's chances to topple the Cardinals.

*South Florida's home run hire of Willie Taggart.

*The intriguing union of June Jones and Hal Mumme at SMU.

*Cincinnati's strange new coaching hire.

*And more.

(Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes.)

It wasn't supposed to end this way. (Photo: USA Today Sports)

Ask college football recruiting nuts for some of the most baffling disappointments they can recall, and the name Garrett Gilbert is almost bound to come up.

Gilbert arrived at Texas in 2009 with every accolade imaginable from his stint as quarterback of Lake Travis High School, including being named the national high school offensive player of the year by USA Today in 2008. He was so impressive as a prep that Mack Brown essentially bet the future of his program on the schoolboy legend. The plan was for Gilbert to take the reins as starting QB from Colt McCoy and lead the Longhorns to even greater heights. (Ergo, "Mack Brown offered Quarterback X as a DB.")

Unfortunately for Gilbert, nothing about his time on the 40 Acres went according to plan. Fair or not, after a precipitous drop to a 5-7 campaign in 2010, the ballyhooed quarterback came to symbolize the collapse of Texas football. Gilbert lasted two games as the starter in 2011 before hitting the bench and deciding that he needed a change of scenery.

When Kliff Kingsbury was hired as the head coach at Texas Tech this past winter, it was lauded as both a steal for the school and a win for young bros looking for a big break everywhere. After all, it’s not often that a school takes a chance in giving a plush head coaching job to any 33-year-old, let alone one that walks around with the swag of your average 30-something at happy hour every Friday night.  

Still, questions did remain about Kingsbury’s hire, specifically on whether or not he was able to discipline a group of football players that were barely older than he was.

Only apparently on Tuesday we got an answer to the question of: “What happens when a bro stops being polite and starts getting real?” And we got it in the most hilarious way possible.

Not to go all Hubie Brown on you here, but on Monday, “one of the great injustices we have in OUR sport was corrected”: Legendary Nebraska quarterback Tommie Frazier was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame. The quarterback who won two National Championships in four seasons as a Cornhusker will finally go into the Hall in 2013, even though he became eligible for induction back in 2006.

Better late than never, I suppose.

And on Tuesday, the National College Football Hall of Fame officially announced the rest of its class via press release.