MAC sets up football schedule

Teams to play six conference games; No championship awarded this season

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Should the state give the go-ahead, the Midwest Athletic Conference will play a six-game regular season schedule against conference opponents after the MAC athletic board approved the format on Monday.

Last Friday, statewide football coaches and conferences heard about a proposed change to the 2020 schedule involving trimming the regular season down to six games with all teams eligible for the playoffs.

On Monday, the Midwest Athletic Conference athletic directors came up with a schedule should the state give the green light for games this fall.

Commisioner Don Kemper said the process to figure out condensing the usual 10-week schedule - two non-conference games followed by eight in-conference games - began Friday after the Ohio High School Athletic Association issued its press release.

"We went into (Monday's meeting) prepared with a couple of proposals," said Kemper via telephone after the release of the schedule. "People had time to look at them and digest them to come up with questions. (The process) went smoother than I expected it to go."

All six regular season games for each MAC school will be against conference opponents. The traditional Week 1 and Week 2 non-conference games will be filled by what would have been Week 7 and Week 8 in conference play with Weeks 3 through 6 being played as originally scheduled.

October 9 will be the start of the OHSAA playoffs. MAC teams that were originally scheduled to face each other Week 9 or 10 games will have the ability to play those games if both teams are eliminated from the playoffs.

"We maintained the integrity of Weeks 9 and 10," said Kemper. "Let's say two of our teams are out of the playoffs were scheduled to play in Week 9 or 10, they could still play."

With the truncated schedule, that conference decided not to award a team championship this season.

"The possibility could be half the teams could win a co-championship," said Kemper.

While the new schedule may not perfect, the important matter is that this gives MAC teams the opportunity to have a season if the state gives the go-ahead.

"Hopefully, this is not an exercise in futility by doing something that gets canceled anyway," said Kemper. "Hopefully we can follow through. People understand that this is an unique year and we're going to have to do unique things to make it work. Everybody was on board. I won't say people didn't voice their opinions on some things, but at the end of the day, they understood that it's a strange year and we're going to find our way through it."