2025 Yards Per Play: MAC

We are now on the back half of our conference reviews. This week we head to the midwest and examine the Big 10's little brother. 

Here are the 2025 MAC standings.

So we know what each team achieved, but how did they perform? To answer that, here are the Yards Per Play (YPP), Yards Per Play Allowed (YPA) and Net Yards Per Play (Net) numbers for each MAC team. This includes conference play only with the championship game not included. The teams are sorted by Net YPP with conference rank in parentheses.

College football teams play either eight or nine conference games. Consequently, their record in such a small sample may not be indicative of their quality of play. A few fortuitous bounces here or there can be the difference between another ho-hum campaign or a special season. Randomness and other factors outside of our perception play a role in determining the standings. It would be fantastic if college football teams played 100 or even 1000 games. Then we could have a better idea about which teams were really the best. Alas, players would miss too much class time, their bodies would be battered beyond recognition, and I would never leave the couch. As it is, we have to make do with the handful of games teams do play. In those games, we can learn a lot from a team’s YPP. Since 2005, I have collected YPP data for every conference. I use conference games only because teams play such divergent non-conference schedules and the teams within a conference tend to be of similar quality. By running a regression analysis between a team’s Net YPP (the difference between their Yards Per Play and Yards Per Play Allowed) and their conference winning percentage, we can see if Net YPP is a decent predictor of a team’s record. Spoiler alert. It is. For the statistically inclined, the correlation coefficient between a team’s Net YPP in conference play and their conference record is around .66. Since Net YPP is a solid predictor of a team’s conference record, we can use it to identify which teams had a significant disparity between their conference record as predicted by Net YPP and their actual conference record. I used a difference of .200 between predicted and actual winning percentage as the threshold for ‘significant’. Why .200? It is a little arbitrary, but .200 corresponds to a difference of 1.6 games over an eight game conference schedule and 1.8 games over a nine game one. Over or under-performing by more than a game and a half in a small sample seems significant to me. In the 2025 season, which teams in the MAC met this threshold? Here are MAC teams sorted by performance over what would be expected from their Net YPP numbers.

Western Michigan and Toledo were the two MAC teams that saw their actual record differ significantly from their expected record based on YPP. The Broncos overachieved while the Rockets underachieved and the culprit was close game performance. Western Michigan finished 3-0 in one-score conference games while Toledo was 0-2 in such contests. For Toledo, their close game performance overshadowed an otherwise dominant season. The Rockets lost by one point to Western Michigan and five points to Bowling Green. In their other six conference games, they were 6-0 with an average margin of victory of more than thirty points per game. The loss to Western Michigan essentially flipped the conference title as a win by Toledo would have put the Rockets in the conference title game and moved the Broncos into a three-way tie for second place with Miami and Ohio.  

The Kings of Sacramento

North Dakota State stole most of their thunder, but in February, Sacramento State also announced they were also fast tracking their move to FBS, starting with the 2026 season. However, while North Dakota State will be joining a conference with other schools in their geographic footprint (Mountain West), Sacramento State is joining a bunch of midwestern schools (and a few east coasters) in the MAC. While the move is a bit odd and reeks of a little desperation, it will present some interesting schedule quirks. Sacramento State will head east four times this season, with trips to Eastern and Central Michigan, Bowling Green, and Ball State on the schedule. With that in mind, I decided to look at Sacramento State's FCS history and see how they have performed when heading east and when facing FBS opponents. I don't know that either of those things will give us a great deal of insight on what to expect from them in 2026, but its an interesting research project nonetheless. 

Sacramento State joined the FCS in 1993. In the three plus decades they spent at that level, they made exactly one trip to the east coast. They faced Hofstra in 1996 and lost by 30 points. They also rarely ventured east of the Mountain Time Zone, playing just two games in the Central Time Zone. They fared better in those games. I didn't expect a west coast FCS school to make many trips east of the Mississippi, but the Hornets will make more trips east in 2026 than they did in their entire history as an FCS program! The table below summarizes their previous trips east. 

The Hornets will not only be making more trips east in 2026, they will also be facing more FBS opponents (duh). Their schedule features eleven games against FBS teams - eight against MAC foes and non-conference games against Fresno State, Hawaii, and the other FBS newbie, North Dakota State. How have the Hornets fared when they stepped up in class? The short answer, is 'not very well', but the longer answer, with additional context, is 'better lately'.

The Hornets did not face an FBS team until nearly a decade into their run as an FCS program when they traveled to El Paso to face the UTEP Miners in 2002. They lost by 30. And that was mostly how things went for the Hornets. They did pull off two shockers, beating Pac-12 teams Oregon State in 2011 and Colorado in 2012, but through 2019, twelve of their twenty losses against FBS opponents were by at least thirty points. Things have been a little different in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

The Hornets have been much more competitive since 2021, winning a third of their games against FBS opponents while never losing any game by more than 18 points. The sample size is small, but the Hornets are a fourth quarter comeback by Nevada away from posting a .500 record against FBS opponents in the past six years. 

Sacramento State is on their fourth football coach in the past five seasons, so staff continuity is not a strength. At the same time, they have posted five winning seasons in the past six years despite turnover at the head coaching position. Conservatively, the Hornets are in the top third of FCS programs over the past half decade. With that baseline, you would expect them to be competitive against the bottom quartile of FBS, which is the status most teams in the MAC presently occupy. That may be underselling how bad the MAC can be, as they have put some pretty bad teams on the field the past few seasons (hello Kent State and Massachusetts). Despite moving up in class and being a geographic oddity, I expect the Hornets to finish in the top half of the conference in 2026. 

This relationship is probably not built to last. The Hornets are paying an $18 million entry fee to the MAC (as well as $5 million to the NCAA), will not be part of the conference's revenue sharing agreement for five years, and will be covering travel costs for visiting MAC teams. Will the Hornets be members of the MAC in 2036? Probably not. But who knows what FBS even looks like a decade from now. The sport has undergone massive changes in the past fifteen years and those seem to only be accelerating. Just sit back and enjoy the absurdity of Toledo visiting Sacramento on the first Wednesday in November in a conference game.