Relative stability has been the MAC's calling card for most of its existence. Ohio is the only original member, but half the membership is part of the group that formed the league's nucleus in the early 1950s and three others joined back in the 1970s. The last three have been around for two decades or more. While it has rarely been...
Boise State v. Northern Illinois
Qualcomm Stadium -- San Diego, CA
December 23, 2015 -- 4:30 pm Eastern (ESPN)
Why You Should Watch
Over the past several seasons, this would have been a monster matchup for whatever lower-level bowl game was able to land these two teams together. This year, the...
Everything is set, with all 40 bowl matchups now set in stone for the 2015 season. We now know that the American Athletic Conference was the undisputed king of the mid-major conferences, that Conference USA and the MAC overtook the Mountain West in the pecking order, and that the Sun Belt is still the caboose of the FBS leagues.
Let's...
For every contender left in the Access Bowl race in 2015, just one plot point remains for each of them as they all strive to present the strongest possible resume for the College Football Playoff selection committee to parse through. Four of the Group of Five conferences have winnowed down to their final two hopefuls in the race for the...
We are getting to a point in the 2015 season where determining which teams will win their respective Group of Five conferences is oddly becoming more difficult. What we are seeing, however, is a clear hierarchy emerging between the mid-major conferences.
Not all conference championships are created equal. Even as undefeated teams have...
With a couple of upsets and a wild comeback keeping things interesting within the Group of Five over Week 11, there is a lot more clarity in some divisions and a lot more confusion as to what might happen in others. This week we winnow down the rankings by one team to 14, as we focus exclusively on those teams that still have a...
This is coming at you late this week for personal reasons, but while we've already seen some weekday Week 11 games take place there is still no logical answer as to why we should not look back at last week's shakedown of the mid-major standings.
Because, in the end, there was a ton of chaos among the Access Bowl hopefuls. By the time...
The top six mid-major teams in the country all held serve this week, winning against overmatched competition to stay in place in the Week 5 Access Bowl Power Rankings. But the field winnowed itself down nevertheless -- we are down to just 11 remaining teams that have one or fewer defeats, and less than 40 percent of the teams in the...
Only five undefeated teams remain among the ranks of the Group of Five conferences. Beyond the teams with unblemished records, just eight more teams are plugging along with only one loss. As September gives way to October, the Access Bowl contenders are starting to distance themselves from the pretenders merely dreaming for a berth in a...
One quarter of the way through the season, the race for the guaranteed New Year's Six bowl invitation is heating up among the Group of Five schools. Only six squads remain undefeated at this point, though after last year there is no guarantee that an unblemished will guarantee that berth. (Remember, Marshall was 12-1 to Boise State's...
