I personally hate MACtion. One weeknight game a season per team, I’m fine with. But for the entire month of November to be moved is stupid. I’ve copied and pasted the article to avoid anyone running into a paywall
# Briggs: Toledo-BG game returning to a frozen weeknight is a ‘travesty’ — and our schools are ready to fight back
DAVID BRIGGS2026-03-25T13:32:54
Call it the myth of MACtion.
The Toledo-Bowling Green football game is returning to a November weeknight, and you know how the Mid-American Conference and ESPN will spin that.
It’s a showcase, a spotlight, a chance to put the rivalry on center stage.
Lucky us!
It’s also complete nonsense.
We’ll say it again: The Battle of I-75 belongs on a Saturday afternoon, end of discussion.
Where the game is a singular civic celebration in northwest Ohio — and positively electric on an October weekend when the setting matches the stakes — it is just interchangeable inventory to ESPN.
Slotting it on a Wednesday night isn’t a sign of respect.
It’s a cold slap in the face.
And, finally, patience is running out.
How much so?
While reporting another recent story — the possibility of Toledo and BG meeting downtown for a third men’s basketball game each season — I learned something even more interesting.
Our schools are discussing supersizing the football rivalry, too. They have explored the idea of adding a second game some years — an early-season nonconference showdown in addition to the regular conference matchup — largely to guarantee one of them falls on a Saturday.
Outgoing Toledo athletic director Bryan Blair called the weeknight rivalry games a “travesty.” Bowling Green AD Derek van der Merwe told me: “We’re open to all creative opportunities.”
“Toledo’s matchup against Bowling Green is the biggest sporting event in northwest Ohio, and it deserves to be seen on a Saturday stage,” Toledo deputy AD Connor Whelan said this week. “Our campus and community deserve that opportunity, as well. A weeknight game will still draw a crowd — it always does — but we need to start thinking about this enterprise differently, and quickly.
“The days of taking the schedule as provided to us is no longer acceptable in today’s climate. If playing twice a year or exploring new formats guarantees this game gets the spotlight it deserves, then we need to look at every option.”
Stay tuned!
That might strike some as an empty threat — although I don’t believe it is — an effort to protect the rivalry in the MAC’s next media contract. The current deal with ESPN — which pays each school about $1 million per year — is up after the 2026-27 season.
But the outside-the-box talks speak to real and just frustration.
The past two seasons reminded us just how special the game is on a Saturday, with overflow crowds rocking the Glass Bowl and Doyt Perry Stadium.
So, naturally, someone asked Google: How do we take all that energy and cut it in half?
Answer: Move the game back to a frozen November weeknight.
It’s as idiotic and disappointing as it is avoidable.
For years, we’ve tried to knock down the two biggest myths of MACtion when it comes to the Toledo–BG rivalry.
The first is the value of TV exposure outweighs all other considerations. It doesn’t.
Believe it or not, a Division I athletic department’s primary purpose is not to provide cut-rate programming for ESPN. It’s to engage and energize its students, donors, fans, and community, and, at Toledo and BG, no event does that like their annual football game.
Truth is, no one in Walla Walla, Wash., or Shreveport, La., has ever flipped to ESPNU on a Wednesday night, watched the rivals play in a half-empty stadium, and thought: I want to be part of THAT.
The real showcase — the real magic — is when the game is on a Saturday afternoon, when the tailgate lots spill over with spirit (and spirits) and the stadiums are packed, the scene humming with nostalgia and possibility. If you’ve been there, you know.
I’ve asked this before, but, if the students, boosters, and taxpayers who subsidize the athletic department in the first place can’t fully enjoy the game they most anticipate, what’s the point of the enterprise?
Now for the second myth: ESPN values the Battle of I-75.
We’re always told Toledo-BG is in demand because it juices ratings.
That’s not really true, either.
To ESPN, the game is more disposable than your old Kodak FunSaver. In four of the past five weeknight meetings, the network didn’t even give the rivalry its top MAC window, consigning the game to ESPNU or CBS Sports Network. (In 2022, the Falcons’ dramatic last-minute win at the snow-swept Glass Bowl played out before a couple thousand frozen diehards, all in the name of 0.0 rating — 102,000 viewers — on ESPNU).
When the game is on a network with real reach, it can draw a nice audience. In 2023, Toledo’s comeback win on ESPN2 averaged 403,000 viewers, the most of any MACtion game that season.
But that contest — a thriller that vaulted the Rockets into the national rankings — was the exception.
By and large, the MACtion games are nameless pieces of inventory, with little correlation between who’s playing and who’s watching. You could plug Faber College against the Duluth Dairy Institute into a Tuesday night slot, and the hardcores and gamblers who require football like oxygen would tune in.
I went through the last five years of weeknight MAC games on ESPN2. They averaged 346,000 viewers, some drawing much less, some many more, often with no rhyme or reason.
ESPN just needs low-cost programming. The teams are almost beside the point.
The MAC will tell us it appreciates our concern, and, to its credit, it has done something. ESPN agreed two years ago to give special consideration to four MAC rivalries: UT–BG, Akron–Kent State, Miami–Ohio, and Central Michigan–Western Michigan.
In a truce meant to balance the interests of the schools against those of television, the designated matchups now rotate in and out of weeknight MACtion. Toledo and Bowling Green played the past two years on a Saturday, so they’ll play the next two years on a weeknight.
Fair enough.
But not really.
For the one game that means everything to our community — and next to nothing to ESPN — there should be no compromise.
Toledo-BG belongs on a Saturday.
If the current system won’t allow that, the schools will look for one that will.
First Published March 25, 2026, 1:32 p.m.