The Futon Report

Whee! It’s college football time, which means the Mid-American Conference is ready to lose all their nonconference matchups in the first week!

Take last night, for example:

Central Michigan 31, Eastern Illinois 12
Well, okay, that’s the conference champion and it’s against a FCS team, so you’re bound to have a win. Certainly some of the worse teams will…

Ball State 48, Northeastern 14
…well, sure, but Ball State was in a bowl. Certainly one of the pissbuckets of the MAC didn’t fare as…

Eastern Michigan 52, Indiana State 0
…The hell? Okay, still. These are just FCS teams. Against other FBS schools, certainly they were blown out at…

Buffalo 42, UTEP 17
!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!!

Vanderbilt 34, Miami U. 13
Ah, there it is. God, I was scared for a second.

Football is football, and the conference is 4-1 to start the year. Call it the pinnacle of the year, because tomorrow’s games might not yield the delighted results. Fortunately you don’t get any of these channels:

Actually Started A Couple of Minutes Ago, I Just Learned

Temple at Army ◼ ESPN Classic
All I can say is: that is without question the right channel to feature this game.

Saturday, August 30

12 noon — Bowling Green at #25 Pittsburgh ◼ ESPNU
Kirk Herbstreit said a couple hours ago that this is a trap game for Pitt. Assuming that BGSU never plays defense and always has the ball, he will be correct.

12 noon — Akron at #13 Wisconsin ◼ BTN
I have no doubt the Zips can score a touchdown.

2:00 p.m. — Ohio at Wyoming ◼ The Mtn.
The last Ohioan to visit Wyoming, I think, was me back in March. And I’ll say this about Wyoming: Mountains.

7:00 p.m. — Western Michigan at Nebraska ◼ FSN
Mind you, WMU beat Iowa last year to end the season. And to the Eastern time zone, it’s essentially the same state.

7:00 p.m. — Northern Illinois at Minnesota ◼ BTN
Minnesota lost to a certain MAC school last year on a Saturday night game. This was their way of saying they don’t want that to happen again.

7:30 p.m. — Boston College at Kent State ◼ ESPNU
They’re playing the game in Browns Stadium. Which means BC might be the finest team to play on that field this year.

(Photo credit: Mark Mulville/Buffalo News)

Kent State 49, Miami 47 ◼ Miami interim coach Jermaine Henderson has done an admirable job of filling in for Charlie Coles under adverse conditions. And it’s too bad to see the Miami season end in a closely fought, albeit alarmingly low-scoring game against Kent State.

Before Al Fisher’s hesitation jumper to seal the win, coach Henderson had a message for his RedHawks team during the timeout, since Kent was able to take the last shot: Kent State will shoot once, and once only. Thanks to the majesty of ESPN360, here’s an audio snippet of Henderson’s final message (right after Steve Mix quips “take it down to about 4 seconds”):

Read more

Ohio 68, Bowling Green 66, 2OT ◼ I suppose when BGSU has to play two overtimes without Kate Achter, and the second OT without Tara Breske, these kinds of upsets are bound to happen.

So after the BG men bowed out of the season back on Tuesday, I really have no peripheral reason to care about college basketball, except to see if the MAC gets two bids to the men’s tournament.

HollaMAC Girls is your eye on the Mid-American Conference women’s basketball tournament. Here’s how the quarterfinals shaked out:

This much we know: Someone in Ohio’s going to win the MAC championship, as all four teams who advanced are from that sorta-heart-shaped region.

Toledo 65, Ball State 60 ◼ The heck? So after dropping seven straight games, UT has now rattled off four straight at the right time, following up a mild first-round upset of Buffalo Monday with an embiggened upset of the Cardinals Tuesday. What if Mark Ehlen’s team just keeps winning all the way through the conference tournament? Does he still resign?

Holla: Ta’Yani Clark, UT: 25 points (5-for-7 from 3 pt.), 9 rebounds; Kiley Jarrett, BSU: 13 points, 5 assists, 4 steals; Tamesha Scotton, UT: 11 points, 8 rebounds Read more

As the regular season comes to a close, we look at the finales of this year’s Mid-American Conference basketball season.

Kent State 61, Akron 58 ◼ This was quite possibly the most noxiously oxidized finish to a MAC game this year. Three 3-point field goals were drilled in the final 21 seconds, one by Akron’s Nick Dials to cut the lead to 3, one by Jeremiah Wood to tie the game with 8 seconds remaining, then a bucket by Kent State’s Al Fisher to seal the game with 2 seconds left.

Considering the rest of the game was slightly blasé — oh look, Kent’s pulling away again — it was good to see that final collapse followed by Fisher’s dramatic OMG THAT JUZT HAPND moment. Read more

On Saturday, as my endeavors this weekend involve a shift at Deadspin and a Toledo-Western game, the Bowling Green basketball team has the chance to dethrone the streaking Kent State, who comes to Anderson Arena. Read more

I dare say, the MAC does not in fact revolve around Toledo, but rather all colleges revolve about the conference.

“BURRRN HIM!”

Even though UT’s comeback win over Ohio University was a feat of beauty, it’s easy to get caught up in the “UT always wins at home and loses on the road” mantra because, well, that makes the season a lot simpler. But they play actual games with actual humans without factoring past results or tea leaves into future final scores, so maybe it wasn’t just the security blanket within the Savage Hall walls that caused Toledo to win and Ohio to lose. Read more

The Greg Stempin Variety Hour is the periodical celebration of excellence and existence of MAC basketball.

The story this year has been teams going on the road and losing nine out of 10 times. No exaggeration. After last Saturday, the home team was 32-4 in conference play. But Wednesday night the home team as 1-3. The exception? Of course it was Toledo. Read more

When a team loses five key players on a basketball team, the following season is always slightly rougher. But the BGSU gals were actually keeping it together for quite some time, going 11-3 headed into conference play. (Three losses, if you recall, was as many as they had in 2006-07.)

Somehow I knew it wouldn’t last, as much as I didn’t want to admit it.

Conference play began just fine, winning their first four. Then came last week. A loss at home to Miami. Then came absolute decimation at Ball State, 68-47. Read more