While expansion and realignment rumors swirl around the rest of the G5, the MAC is just here in the Midwest doing its thing. The fact that the MAC often has teams capable of beating P5 opponents (WMU and CMU this season, Toledo and Bowling Green last season, and NIU for the past few years) gives the midweek games legitimacy that they might otherwise lack. Nowadays you see PAC 12 games on Friday nights, the ACC will play a Thursday or Friday night game virtually every week this season, and even the Big Ten and SEC started off the year with weeknight games. Midweek games were new and virtually unprecedented, and the MAC made it work with entertaining, well-played football that captivated a much larger audience than just MAC fans and alumni. While the whole thing seems like a meme today, MACtion really did change the way that we watch college football today. Of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up #MACtion. The MAC deal is also longer than any other G5 contract. The AAC gets more money ($1.5 million per school), but might be the least stable of the G5 conferences due to its overlap with three P5 conferences, lack of historical ties, and makeup of schools from former power conferences. That's way ahead of Conference USA ($200K per school), the Sun Belt ($100K), and the Mountain West ($636K split unevenly). The 12 schools of the MAC are splitting $10MM/year until the end of the contract in 2027, netting $833,000 per school. Part of that has to be the fact that most MAC schools are in the Big Ten footprint, which is one of the two most stable P5 conferences. The remarkable thing to me is that there are no rumors swirling around the MAC the way they are around the AAC, Conference USA, the Sun Belt, or even the Mountain West.
All current members have been in the conference since at least 1998 (Buffalo is the least-tenured current member), and many have been members since the 1940s and 50s. Marshall was actually a member previously until being expelled in 1969 for NCAA violations. Since 1978 (I'm using that year because that's when the NCAA split D1 football into 1-A and 1-AA), the MAC has seen just four teams enter and leave the conference in football: Temple (2007-2012), UMass (2013-2015), UCF (2002-2005), and Marshall (1997-2005). I was just reading some of the expansion/conference affiliation threads and got to thinking about the MAC and how it's been remarkably stable in this era of realignment.