MAC Sports Blog by VanDelay Sports

Coming into today’s games, the MAC football standings did not give us enough data to really see who was in the race for the MAC East and West Division titles. While schedules seemed to line up well for teams like Central Michigan, Ohio and Temple in their respective divisions, we needed to see another week of data to truly draw more informed assumptions.

With Week #6 now behind us and 2-3 conference games in the books for every MAC team, the MAC West championship will once again have to go through the Central Michigan Chippewas. With their 56-8 drubbing of Eastern Michigan today, CMU improved to 3-0 in MAC play. We will know more, much more, about the Chippewas in two weeks as they travel to Western Michigan and Bowling Green in the next two weeks and still have to worry about Northern Illinois, the lone other MAC West team without a loss in conference play. NIU, meanwhile, had a week off after crushing WMU last week. The Huskies are at Toledo next weekend and have @ Ohio and @ CMU in the final two weeks of the season.

The MAC East race could be building up to the last week of the season when Ohio hosts Temple. The Bobcats are now 2-0 in MAC play with road wins @ BG and @ Akron while Temple has defeated Buffalo in Week 3 and has taken care of the scheduling break in beting EMU and Ball State in the past two weeks. With two of the next three games being out of conference, the October 24 game @ Toledo could be huge for the Owls considering they have not looked good against supposedly lesser teams including a loss to Division I-AA (FCS) Villanova. Ohio, meanwhile, could very well be 5-0 in MAC play headed into a tough final three games of the season. With Miami and Kent State at home and Ball State on the road, the Bobcats final three will be much tougher on paper @ Buffalo and at home versus NIU and Temple in the final weeks of the season.

Midseason MAC Predictions: Central Michigan will win the MAC West and Ohio will edge Temple for the MAC East title. CMU tops Ohio in the MAC Championship and CMU, Ohio, NIU and WMU will be bowl eligible. Temple’s key to bowl eligibility in 2009 will be wins versus both Army and Navy. A loss in either makes them 1-3 out of the conference needing no worse than 6-2 to have a serious shot at a bowl game, assuming they do not win the MAC East.

Tags: mac east standings, mac football standings, mac standings, mac west standings

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 10th, 2009 at 11:02 pm and is filed under MAC Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.