DETROIT — Although college football fans have yet to get their first taste of the upcoming season, media members got a glimpse of what to expect this season Tuesday.
Media assembled at Ford Field for briefings with administrators, coaches and players, where Mid-American Conference commissioner Jon Steinbrecher began the day with comments regarding the current state of the conference.
Steinbrecher announced that the MAC signed a four-year contract extension with Ford Field to keep the MAC Championship game there through 2015, and also renewed Marathon Oil as its chief championship game sponsor for the same timeframe.
The offseason brought changes to the schematics of how college football determines its champion. Institutions from automatic qualifying conferences adopted a playoff system in which, teams now play for the right to be the best.
The MAC isn’t an automatic qualifying conference, so the championship realignment could potentially help its member schools.
“Depending on how the access is worked out, there could be as many if not more access points (for MAC teams),” he said. “The more teams in the system, the better it is for the Mid-American Conference … I like where it’s going, (and) I like the idea of a playoff.”
Steinbrecher said Massachusetts, the MAC’s newest and 13th member, is a perfect fit for the conference as well.
“It’s a top-100 institution, it’s a flagship institution, it’s the type of school that we want to be a part of this organization,” Steinbrecher said. “It helps raise the profile on an academic basis of all of us.”
He added that UMass has a comparable athletic budget to the other conference members, and was hopeful it will have made necessary adjustments to attract top-notch competition within two years.
“I think they had all the parts,” he said.
Once Marshall left for Conference USA in 2005, the conference has had parity. Ten of the schools’ 12 full-member institutions have played in the championship game.
Ohio coach Frank Solich said the current level of competition is different than when he first entered the conference seven years ago.
“There are no low-level football teams in the MAC anymore,” he said. “When I first got here, there were those teams that were tremendous, there were teams that were in the middle and there were those teams at the bottom. I don’t see anyone at the bottom (anymore.)”
nr225008@ohiou.edu
