Free on Saturday Predicts the 2019 MAC Football Season

Predicting the MAC standings in July, an annual pilgrimage to the blogosphere to be wrong four months earlier than we need to be.

There are five or six legitimate contenders to win the MAC in 2019, which means there are at least seven fan bases that will, in the next thirty or so days, convince themselves that this year is destiny. The small but rabid online ecosystem that surrounds this conference is about to get unbearably messy as a result.

Just look at my friend Alex Alvarado, who ahead of MAC media day waded into the unseasonably volatile waters of MAC Twitter:

Publicly signing yourself up to eat a shoe over MAC football is something I 100% support. How is this conference supposed to expand its national brand if people aren’t willing to eat their shoes over it? That’s how you know you’ve truly made it.

And now, my picks:

MAC East

1. Ohio (wins MAC Championship Game)
2. Miami
3. Buffalo
4. Kent State
5. Bowling Green
6. Akron

MAC West

1. Toledo
2. Western Michigan
3. Northern Illinois
4. Eastern Michigan
5. Ball State
6. Central Michigan

Playing it Safe

Bowling Green and Akron aside, my picks align exactly with the MAC media, which means my picks are on the safe side.

The East division has a clear favorite. Ohio is the most talented team in the division and has the MAC’s best football player at quarterback. The rest of the division does not appear to be in a position to really threaten for the division title. Buffalo’s wide receivers are all gone along with the quarterback that threw to them. Miami returns just five starters on defense, Kent State is a little early in its growth and Bowling Green and Akron are starting from scratch. Anything other than a trip to Detroit for Ohio should be seen as a colossal failure.

There are real challenges for the Bobcats on this schedule, but they all come at home. NIU, Miami and Western Michigan all travel to Peden Stadium where the Bobcats are 15–2 since the start of the 2016 season. With a weaker middle-to-bottom of the East division, the Bobcats should have some margin for error anyway.

The West is probably the most unpredictable it’s been in years. In 2016 and 2017 the West division had clear favorites. In 2018 many had themselves talked into Toledo, but it was NIU that clearly had the best team going into the season. Now we’re staring down the barrel at four teams that should reasonably think they can win the division.

That said, don’t overthink it with Toledo. The Rockets should be the favorites. They have an established, rising-star head coach with an excellent track record. They scored 40 points per game in 2018 despite graduating Logan Woodside and starting two different quarterbacks due to injury. They recruit at a high level relative to the conference and all of the important games come at home. It’s their division to lose.

The division won’t go quietly of course. It almost never does. Northern Illinois, Western Michigan and, yes, Eastern Michigan should all feel very good about their chances at a division title this season. I think Toledo wins the West but won’t be one bit surprised if either of these teams win — especially NIU, for reasons that should be obvious.

The Most Interesting Things About the 2019 MAC Football Season

In no particular order, here are the first things that come to mind when thinking about this year’s edition of MAC football:

Jon Wassink’s Health

• The WMU quarterback suffered season-ending injuries in back to back years. In 2017, Wassink left a game against EMU that the Broncos eventually won, but his absence turned the offense into a 70/30 rushing team and cost them at least two wins
• The first was a home collapse to CMU where as the weather turned sour the Broncos were unable to do anything but run, and the Chips knew it.
• The second was a road loss to NIU that WMU largely had no business being in, but had it had Wassink under center probably would have won.

Bryant Koback Unleashing Hell

• The Kentucky transfer is about to light the MAC on fire. We know this because A) Toledo running backs always do and B) holy crap can this kid play.
• Koback is probably the most important transfer into the MAC in recent memory, and in just his first season as a Rocket he averaged six yards per carry on just 156 touches. He should see over 200 touches this year and I shudder at the thought of what he’ll do with them.

Mike Neu’s Impossible Fourth Year

• If there’s a bold prediction I could make about this season, it’s that Mike Neu might be out of a job by Halloween.
• Until beating Western Michigan in overtime last year, Ball State had yet to win a game beyond week seven under Mike Neu.
• Other than the home game against Fordham in week two, Ball State will likely be the underdog (in most cases a steep one) in every game until November 16th. The final three games against Central Michigan, Kent State and Miami, if Neu survives the bye week headed into the CMU game, could be the last chance Neu has to be the Ball State head coach in 2020.
• Ball State must pull some upsets to set the Neu era on the right course. I don’t think he’s built up enough good will to use the schedule, which is absolutely brutal, as an excuse.

Eastern Michigan. Just like, in general.

• The Eagles are the only team in the MAC West that I can say with certainty got better this off season. With a healthy Mike Glass this team will be dangerous on offense, truly for the first time under Chris Creighton.
• The defense will be slightly worse, and my galaxy brain take on this is that’s a good thing. Creighton won’t get to rely on the defense and keep games close for no reason other than he can, and has a quarterback that isn’t turnover prone he can trust to whip the ball around a bit.
• The Eagles are this year’s fun team, but it will be interesting to see how much higher they’ve raised their ceiling. The usual suspects atop the division are still very good, but EMU has the highest ceiling of teams not named Toledo.

Buffalo on the Rebound

• Buffalo is this year’s wild card team. I have them penciled in for five definite wins with four additional swing games that could decide their fate.
• Lance Leipold is a hell of a football coach and I don’t think the work he’s done at Buffalo will be completely dismantled in just one season. Jarret Patterson will make a case for best running back in the MAC week to week and the Bulls should still be pretty exciting.

Transfer Portal Year One Impacts

• Everyone’s blaming the “kids these days” for wanting the freedom to choose where they play football. The transfer portal is fine. Will some players make mistakes and go to situations that are worse for them? Sure, but don’t act like that doesn’t happen all the time in the real world. Learning from mistakes means making mistakes while having the freedom to make them yourself. Most players are going to find better situations, sometimes places that are more deserving of their talents. Jayden Reed left Western Michigan for Michigan State, and while he may not catch as many balls or be as prolific there, he’ll get a chance to play for Big Ten titles. Who can fault that decision? K.J. Osborn got to move from Buffalo to Miami, which makes him a big winner of this round of the transfer portal.
• The impacts these moves have on their teams will be critical to watch, because if this level of movement is the new normal, everything we do in the MAC’s off season will have to change. The makeup of even the best teams could change drastically year to year and make for a much more volatile conference.

NIU’s Seemingly Unsolvable Quarterback Problem

• NIU’s just plain weird. Marcus Childers has one of the gutsiest performances I’ve ever seen to deliver NIU it’s fourth MAC title in eight seasons, and yet almost nobody feels he’s one of the top signal callers in the conference.
• Averaging 4.5 yards per pass on offense will do that to you.
• Ross Bowers, a graduate transfer from Cal, has arrived on the scene. Bowers is not your usual Power-Five-to-MAC grad transfer, in that his career has not been defined as a bench player.
• Bowers started 12 games for Cal in 2017 and threw for over 3,000 yards. The touchdown to interception ratio (18/12) could use some work, but those numbers should make him NIU’s easy week one starter, one would think.
• But Thomas Hammock’s decision isn’t that simple. Childers has to be in the running for the job at least — he won NIU a MAC title. I do not envy being the new guy that may have to come in and bench a MAC title game hero. This quarterback situation is very weird and could loom over the entire Huskie season.

Kent State’s Development

• Kent State’s first year under Sean Lewis should be viewed as a success. He managed to run significantly more plays than the 2017 team while actually reducing turnovers. That is tough to do with what was essentially the same roster, and I think it speaks volumes to the Flash Fast approach to things at Kent State. It seems to be working. If it continues to work as well as it did at Bowling Green, Kent State fans won’t have to wait much longer for some fireworks.