2013 MAC football previews: Every team, from schedules to projections

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

As the past few months of the football offseason have elapsed, I’ve noticed that Northern Illinois’ performance in the 2013 Orange Bowl has been lumped pretty closely to Hawaii’s performance in the 2008 Sugar Bowl. Granted, NIU did not put up a Boise State- or TCU-esque performance in its BCS bowl opportunity, but I did want to take the time to remind everybody that, heading into the fourth quarter, the score was Florida State 17, Northern Illinois 10. Yes, FSU scored twice early in the fourth to make it a 21-point cushion. Yes, FSU physically dominated. But of course FSU physically dominated. The Seminoles were one of the most physically impressive teams in the country, and NIU was small even by MAC standards.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

Your defense is obliterated by injury, your offense regresses a hair, and you win nine games. That’s a pretty good sign that you’ve reached your chosen destination.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

A year ago, Toledo entered the season with a super-young, new head coach and without its top two running backs, three of its top four pass targets, three starting offensive linemen, its top three defensive linemen, two of its top four linebackers, and three of its top four defensive backs. Under Tim Beckman, the Rockets had recruited quite well in comparison to the rest of the MAC, but this was a lot of inexperience to overcome.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

I am just young enough to still have my mind blown when somebody younger than me is hired to become the head football coach at an FBS school. I’m sure this feeling will die down more with each passing year.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

I don’t want to claim that this is the year BGSU’s title streak comes to an end. There are plenty of MAC teams with a strong shot at the top spot -- the usual suspects (Northern Illinois, Toledo, Ohio), the upstarts (Central Michigan, Buffalo), the encores (Kent State, Ball State), and the bouncebacks (Western Michigan) might all have roles to play in what should be a really fun race. All I can say for sure, though, is that Bowling Green had one of the best mid-major defenses in the country last season and will bring one of the most experienced FBS two-deeps to the table in 2013.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

Our F/+ rankings archive goes back to 2005. According to their F/+ rating, here are the 10 worst teams to participate in a bowl game in the last eight seasons:

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

From the time Dennis Fitzgerald left town in 1977 (after seasons of 8-4 and 6-5) until the start of 2012, the glory days for Kent State football basically consisted of that one year where Glen Mason got them to 7-4 and then left (1987). In that span of 35 seasons, Kent State had a winning record twice, and won one or fewer games in a season 10 times. The program that gave Don James his first head coaching job and produced players like Jack Lambert and future coaches like Nick Saban and Gary Pinkel in the 1970s was a football wasteland for most of the last three decades, and while Doug Martin (head coach from 2004 to 2010) came really, really close to breaking through (5-7 with a pretty good defense in both 2009 and 2010), he never did.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

You can understand fan discontent. In 2010, Jeff Quinn took over a Buffalo team that had won 18 games in three seasons after winning just 12 in the preceding eight years. Buffalo won six games per year in 2007-09 and has won just three per year since. That’s not good. And when Quinn received a contract extension in November, as a 4-8 campaign was wrapping up, one had to figure Buffalo fans weren’t altogether pleased. And they weren’t.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

The Cradle of Coaches is suffering a bit of an existential crisis at the moment. Or at the very least, the Miami football program is feeling a bit queasy after a roller coaster of a last decade. In 2003, with Ben Roethlisberger behind center and the late Terry Hoeppner on the sideline, the Redhawks went 13-1 and finished 10th in the country. It was the ninth in what would become an 11-year streak of winning seasons for the school that had made more impressive hires than almost any school in college football history.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

There are a few different ways to build talent when you take over a program that has fallen on hard times. (And when you go 3-33 over a three-year span, I figure that probably qualifies as “hard times.”) You can load up on junior college transfers, hoping the immediate boost they provide can carry you to both success and the ability to sign better four-year players a couple of years down the road. You can load up on transfers from other schools, hoping for the same thing. Or you can simply sign classes of mostly four-year talent, hoping that the short-term pain (and unlikely immediate success) is mitigated by the long-term pluses of steady program building.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

To put it kindly, Eastern Michigan doesn’t have much of a football history. The Eagles (then called the Hurons) experienced just one winning season in their first 11 years as a Division I program. They went 10-2 under Jim Harkema and won the California Bowl in 1987, won another 13 games in 1988-89 ... and have not won more than six games in a season since. Rick Rasnick went 6-5 in 1995. Ron English went 6-6 in 2011 (EMU was ineligible for a bowl that year because they won two games versus FCS teams). And that’s your EMU football history.