MAC in Bowl Games

The other day, I took a look back at the MAC’s Bowl Game performance history since 2016.
The good news is that in the five years from 2016 through 2020, the MAC has played in 26 Bowl Games.
The bad news is that the MAC is 7-19 in those games. UGH…but why?
It does appear from looking at the MAC opponents that the opponents come from “higher ranked conferences” leading me to conclude that the MAC is generally considered to be fodder for higher-ranked/ rated schools looking for a relatively easy win to make their overall season record look a bit better. Of course, this also makes the MAC teams generally look worse. I also think that MAC Bowl opponents generally travel better than do MAC schools but that’s a topic for another thread.
Incidentally, Ohio U owns three of those seven Bowl wins and Buffalo has two. Miami is 0-2…(with still a shot this year to book a win—fingers crossed).
Last point: this year the MAC “qualified” eight teams for Bowl Games and, so far, true to form, the MAC stands 0-3.

1 Like

The MAC continues to look for its first win in this bowl season. So far 0-4. Miami will be trying to end the “streak” on Thursday. Let’s get it done!

You can look for “reasons,” and there probably are some legitimate ones, but at the end of the day, the MAC just isn’t a very good conference right now. Every now and then we’ll have a team at/near the Top 25, but even then, most of the rest of the conference is pretty bad.

3 Likes

As long as we win, I don’t care about the rest of us. The checks will clear. But if we do our normal, save me a spot up front in the mob.

6 Likes

The MAC is obviously the worst FBS conference this season. But lets be the best of the worst and the first to win a bowl game.

1 Like

The MAC average is above the C-USA and Sun Belt averages in the Sagarin ratings covering this whole season. To an extent we might look worse than we actually are because we have extreme parity and got eight teams into bowl games, which means our 6th/7th/8th best teams are probably better than their peers in the Belt (who only got in four teams but three of them had double digit wins) but worse than their bowl opponents. The system tends to make it easier for conferences to have a good bowl record if they have a few great teams at the expense of pushing the average ones out of a bowl.

That of course doesn’t explain our East winner getting their doors blown off by a meh MWC team, or our champ losing to a Belt school that didn’t even win their division. There are questions that need to be asked about how we improve as a conference, but it isn’t like we’re the early 2000s Sun Belt.

Or Eastern getting absolutely smoked by a team that lost the last three games of its season and four of its last five.I guess the real test is head to head against the Belt and CUSA and right now we’re not looking very good. Maybe tomorrow starts to turn things around. And I’m thinking there is a possibility Central could pull off a surprise against Boise.

The MAC didn’t have anything close to an elite team this year, but the top half of our league was okay overall. Pretty weird year.