With news of Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany's retirement, effective June of 2020, I feel MAC Commissioner, Dr. Jon Steinbrecher, will be among the top candidates to replace Delany.

IMHO, Steinbrecher has been a great commissioner for the MAC.

Possibly, but it wouldn't be a surprise to me if the Big 10 has a deputy commissioner (or whatever they call it) that has been getting groomed for years to assume the position.

(03-04-2019 03:05 PM)BeatWestern! Wrote:  With news of Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany's retirement, effective June of 2020, I feel MAC Commissioner, Dr. Jon Steinbrecher, will be among the top candidates to replace Delany.

IMHO, Steinbrecher has been a great commissioner for the MAC.

Steinbrecher has almost single handedly destroyed the MAC. If the Big 10 takes him we get a big big big break.

(03-05-2019 12:01 AM)MaddDawgz02 Wrote:  

(03-04-2019 03:05 PM)BeatWestern! Wrote:  With news of Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany's retirement, effective June of 2020, I feel MAC Commissioner, Dr. Jon Steinbrecher, will be among the top candidates to replace Delany.

IMHO, Steinbrecher has been a great commissioner for the MAC.

Steinbrecher has almost single handedly destroyed the MAC. If the Big 10 takes him we get a big big big break.

IMHO, Steinbrecher is the best commissioner the MAC has ever had in its 73-year history.

If anyone destroyed the MAC I'd say it was Rick Chryst. I'm not really sure how Steinbrecher ranks among the other commissioners as frankly I wasn't around for most of them. I do think Steinbrecher inherited a pretty crappy situation and has made the most of it. Basketball has seemed to have gotten back to levels we haven't seen in at least 20 years. He inked that TV that gave MAC teams a nice pay bump right before the market for non-P5 content collapsed. We now have more basketball and football games on national TV than ever before. At the same time C-USA and the SunBelt have pretty much been relegated to facebook watch and other obscure streaming sites.

I wasn’t aware that the MAC was destroyed. I think we are a strong G5 conference. Did I miss something?

If someone thinks we should have become a P5 conference, they haven’t been paying attention the last, oh, fifty-plus years or so. The conference was designed to be a secondary conference in the Big 10 footprint and that’s exactly what it has been and continues to be. It’s also what the member schools signed up for. Schools that want to be “power conference” schools should massively increase their budgets and facilities and go do that. The only thing holding them back is themselves, not the MAC.

(03-05-2019 01:22 PM)axeme Wrote:  I wasn’t aware that the MAC was destroyed. I think we are a strong G5 conference. Did I miss something?

If someone thinks we should have become a P5 conference, they haven’t been paying attention the last, oh, fifty-plus years or so. The conference was designed to be a secondary conference in the Big 10 footprint and that’s exactly what it has been and continues to be. It’s also what the member schools signed up for. Schools that want to be “power conference” schools should massively increase their budgets and facilities and go do that. The only thing holding them back is themselves, not the MAC.

(03-05-2019 01:22 PM)axeme Wrote:  I wasn’t aware that the MAC was destroyed. I think we are a strong G5 conference. Did I miss something?

If someone thinks we should have become a P5 conference, they haven’t been paying attention the last, oh, fifty-plus years or so. The conference was designed to be a secondary conference in the Big 10 footprint and that’s exactly what it has been and continues to be. It’s also what the member schools signed up for. Schools that want to be “power conference” schools should massively increase their budgets and facilities and go do that. The only thing holding them back is themselves, not the MAC.

Meh. Football has been down since 2015. We lose nearly every bowl game. In 2016 we had the best G5 team, yes, but in a league that was pretty bad. Single player development has been nice throwing all stars into the NFL... But the AAC, MWC and now SBC are better in football as a whole. CUSA is watered down (14 team league) but their top couple have been beating us lately too. FIU, FAU, Marshall, UAB... The MAC NEEDS Miami and BG to get back to prominence. Someone has to challenge Ohio in the East. UB and Akron and KSU come around once a decade to compete then drift back off... They aren't football schools though so that's okay. Toledo and NIU have been at the top of the league but aren't getting pushed by Ball State and CMU enough. WMU goes in and out of relevance and has definitely been a plus. EMU being good is a nice change.

In the last 10 years rank the league in strength.

2015 (Toledo, BG, NIU very good)
2013 (BG, NIU very good with UB and others going to bowls in a very deep year)
2012 (Kent vs NIU In a ranked title game, with NIU going to the Orange bowl. Toledo and Ohio were also good)
2011 (Very deep league with tons of offense from Toledo and WMU. NIU beat Ohio in the title game, with the best offense NIU has had during their current bowl run)
2010 (Miami upsetting NIU in the championship game)
2016 (WMU going to cotton)

In whatever order you want those are they good or decent MAC years in football. Bad years were 2018, 2017, 2014, 2008 and 2009.

Prior to Ohio and NIU surging when you think of the MAC you would think of Miami, BG, Marshall and Toledo with good NIU and WMU teams being mixed in. Actually you may know half of the league on the national scale because we won out of conference so often.

Now it's NIU, Ohio, Toledo and people may think FLECK was still at WMU more recent than 2016....

Well for starters the MAC has no chance of surpassing the AAC with the teams the AAC currently has. Those schools spend way more than the other G5 schools and they have a handful of schools that have brand power that no MAC school can come close to meeting.

The MAC might be able to outperform the MWC every x-number of years, but I don't see the MAC ever surpassing the MWC on a consistent basis. C-USA and the SunBelt are really who we're competing against.

Steinbrecher is a disaster, I really hope he moves on. Need to get a commish that cares about growth for the conference.

I think he's been fine.

(03-05-2019 04:49 PM)MaddDawgz02 Wrote:  Steinbrecher is a disaster, I really hope he moves on. Need to get a commish that cares about growth for the conference.

I know you're on a weird one man crusade because of the midweek games, but playing cold November games that would've been sparsely attended anyway has brought a ton of exposure to schools that would have otherwise been lost in the shuffle. I would bet that NIU never goes to the Orange Bowl if not for the ESPN deal. Similarly GameDay never would have gone to Kalamazoo.

I would argue that with streaming being what it is, the midweek games have just about run their course. Maybe have one a week or something but the number is way too high. But they served a purpose and your hissy fit assertions that they destroyed the league are a joke.

It seems a lot of other conferences have started following the MAC trend of playing Tuesday-Friday games. My lone complaint was that if we have mid-week games in November, we should move rivalry games to October. They seemed to have done that this year.

(03-05-2019 08:04 PM)kreed5120 Wrote:  It seems a lot of other conferences have started following the MAC trend of playing Tuesday-Friday games. My lone complaint was that if we have mid-week games in November, we should move rivalry games to October. They seemed to have done that this year.

Correct which has also hurt the MAC since the oversaturation means fewer eyes on the MAC games.

I would like to see the deal reworked so that ESPN can't just move almost all the games to midweek and pick only one to be on national TV while the others get shoved to the U or even ESPN+. I think staying with ESPN would be great for the streaming services and maybe compromise with one or two featured midweek games per week.

That may cost the league a little bit of money in the deal but I think that amount of money (a little over $1M per team per year I believe) is overblown a bit in importance.

(03-05-2019 04:49 PM)MaddDawgz02 Wrote:  Steinbrecher is a disaster, I really hope he moves on. Need to get a commish that cares about growth for the conference.

I agree.

(03-05-2019 08:04 PM)kreed5120 Wrote:  It seems a lot of other conferences have started following the MAC trend of playing Tuesday-Friday games. My lone complaint was that if we have mid-week games in November, we should move rivalry games to October. They seemed to have done that this year.

well, except for one highly notable rivalry!

(03-05-2019 06:45 PM)wmubroncopilot Wrote:  

(03-05-2019 04:49 PM)MaddDawgz02 Wrote:  Steinbrecher is a disaster, I really hope he moves on. Need to get a commish that cares about growth for the conference.

I know you're on a weird one man crusade because of the midweek games, but playing cold November games that would've been sparsely attended anyway has brought a ton of exposure to schools that would have otherwise been lost in the shuffle. I would bet that NIU never goes to the Orange Bowl if not for the ESPN deal. Similarly GameDay never would have gone to Kalamazoo.

I would argue that with streaming being what it is, the midweek games have just about run their course. Maybe have one a week or something but the number is way too high. But they served a purpose and your hissy fit assertions that they destroyed the league are a joke.

After the close Iowa loss, NIU won 12 games in a row including the MACC against a ranked Kent State team. That, and everyone in front of them in the rankings losing, was what got NIU in. They played one game against Toledo on ESPN2, and I doubt anyone other than NIU fans and the occasional inveterate gambler saw any of the other games.

Why do we have divisions in basketball?

(03-06-2019 09:38 AM)bobcat_backer Wrote:  

(03-05-2019 08:04 PM)kreed5120 Wrote:  It seems a lot of other conferences have started following the MAC trend of playing Tuesday-Friday games. My lone complaint was that if we have mid-week games in November, we should move rivalry games to October. They seemed to have done that this year.

well, except for one highly notable rivalry!

Yeah, but that seemed to be because they wanted to give you guys the 150th anniversary game.

(03-06-2019 11:16 AM)UofToledoFans Wrote:  Why do we have divisions in basketball?

To minimize travel. I still think it's dumb.