Mid-American Conference

About

Founded in 1946, the Mid-American Conference (often referred to as the MAC), has 13 members and its teams compete in 24 sports (11 for men and 13 for women). In football, conference members compete in the Football Subdivision. At the start of the 2025-26 school year, the Mid-American Conference had 13 full members - Akron, Ball State, Bowling Green, University at Buffalo, Central Michigan, Eastern Michigan, Kent State, UMass, Miami University, Northern Illinois, Ohio University, Toledo and Western Michigan. In January, Northern Illinois announced it will join the Mountain West Conference as a football-only member for the 2026 season. In February, the Mid-American Conference announced that Sacramento State will join the conference as a football-only member for the 2026 season. After some early shuffling of members, the Mid-American Conference enjoyed a period of relative stability in from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. The first wave of expansion came when Central Michigan and Eastern Michigan joined the conference in 1972 and Ball State and Northern Illinois followed a year later. At various times, Butler, Cincinnati, Marshall, Wayne State and Case Western Reserve have been members of the Mid-American Conference. Prior to the 2024 football season, the Mid-American Conference eliminated its East and West Divisions in favor of a new scheduling format using a pod-base format to protect existing rivalries, such as Kent State/Akron and Eastern Michigan/Central Michigan. The current format also guarantees that each team will face every other conference team at least once every three years. The MAC Football Championship Game that previously matched the two division winners, now features the two teams win the highest conference winning percentage. Mid-American Conference football teams play in moderate-sized stadiums ranging from 17,000 to 36,000 seats. While some Mid-American Conference sporting events are televised on national networks, the conference also gets strong regional exposure on networks like SportsTime Ohio and Fox Sports Ohio. The Mid-American Conference is headquartered in Cleveland and its top athletes earn money through revenue sharing and NIL (name, image and likeness) deals. The conference's most famous alum is Nick Saban, who played defensive back at Kent State in the 1970s, before going on to become one of the most successful coaches in college football history.