MAC Football Week 11 Review: We Know What the MAC Title Game is Going to Be
It’s NIU-Buffalo, duh.
Another exciting week of MAC football is in the books and w — okay I can’t. It wasn’t that exciting, but it was important, and that’s okay too. Buffalo took Kent State aside and gave them a lesson on how far it is from being a player in the division. Eastern Michigan reminded Akron that if you can’t play offense, it will happily maul you for an entire afternoon on a gray field. Bowling Green beat Central Michigan, which established once and for all who the worst team in 2018 is. On the other end of the spectrum, NIU clobbered Toledo and gave us our answer to “who will play Buffalo in the MAC Championship Game?” There’s two weeks left before the big game at Ford Field, but here’s the big takeaways from week 11:
Miami Won its Biggest Game in Years, so its Coach Made it About Himself
Miami bested Ohio for just the second time in 14 seasons. A team with no choice but to win out in order to make it to a second bowl game in three seasons played one of its best halves of the year at home against a hated rival. The team’s MAC East title hopes are gone, but the RedHawks, even at 4–6, are truly one of the MAC’s top teams. So of course Chuck Martin’s closing argument on the season is that the fans and media are idiots and the MAC schools are cheap because they don’t have a trophy to play for in the Battle of the Bricks.
You see, this moment is all about Chuck Martin. Sure, he talked a lot about the kids playing hard and going through hell to make a bad program better, but that was between all the important stuff, like how it was stupid for fans to boo a team that needed a safety to score a single point in the second half at home. How dare these fans get nervous about a team that has won so many close games in Martin’s tenure? Except well, this team doesn’t win close games, does it? Maybe the fans remembered the Cincinnati game last season. Maybe they remembered losing to Buffalo, or to Marshall (again). Actually, I think the fans agree with coach Martin here. It is all about him, just not in the way he thinks.
We Know Who the Worst Team is. It isn’t Bowling Green
What I and the team over at Tuesday Night Lights dubbed the Butt Game of the Century of the Week and it absolutely lived up to the billing. Neither team broke 350 yards of total offense, but Central Michigan only managed 166 yards against the MAC’s worst defense by a wide margin. It caps off a year for the Chippewas that has been an abject failure on offense. It looked like, earlier in the season, that Central Michigan would be able to steal a game or two against MAC teams by virtue of its defense keeping them in games. But the offensive improvement never game, no matter who was thrown into the game at quarterback, and now the Chips have a lot of questions to answer as the off season looms.
For Bowling Green, it’s always nice to see an embattled team rise up and get a win on the road. Nobody would fault these kids for punting on the season and waiting to see who the next coach is, but they didn’t and the program will be better for it going forward. That said, Falcon fans have seen this movie before, and a BG team improving in the final games of the season should be taken with a whole heap of salt until the results come the year after.
“Here at Northern Illinois, We’re Better Than You, and We Know It”
It’s like this every year, but MAC West supremacy came down to the NIU-Toledo game. As it often does, NIU came out on top, but this time was different. It was an absolute beat down. All those questions about whether NIU’s lack of offensive firepower could hold up in the MAC have been put to rest, after the Huskies proved they could play a horrible offensive game and still come away victorious.
Now for the scary part. The Huskies didn’t play a poor offensive football game. They racked up over 400 yards of offense, nearly 300 of which was on the ground thanks to Tre Harbison’s huge day. As a team, NIU averaged 6.7 yards per carry, exploiting a poor Toledo defense in a way a “bad” offense shouldn’t even be able to despite that fact. What you have here is a team that is in a class of its own in the division hitting its stride at absolutely the right time. In a few weeks the Huskies will go toe to toe with the Buffalo Bulls for MAC supremacy. It’s going to be a fantastic game between two teams that actually play defense, something that usually comes at a premium in this conference.
