Toledo

Toledo is the MAC's quiet institution — a half-century of consistently good football in the Glass Bowl, a 1937 WPA-era stone stadium that is one of the oldest and most characterful venues in the conference. The 35-game regular-season unbeaten streak from 1969 to 1972 is the program's deepest canon, capped by a quarterback named Chuck Ealey who never lost a college game. That kind of winning doesn't happen by accident at a mid-sized Ohio school; it happens because the culture of the program is built around the MAC title as the standard, not the exception.

Candle's decade — MAC championships in 2017 and 2022, sustained top-half-of-the-conference football, and finally the all-time wins record — represented exactly what the program is supposed to be. Then he left for UConn. The final wound of his tenure was the 2025 I-75 game: Toledo led Bowling Green 21-0 and lost 28-23, the kind of collapse that stings more because the program finished 8-4 and still ended the season with a loss to its oldest rival rattling around the locker room. Now Mike Jacobs — a Maumee native, a former Ohio State offensive lineman, a coach who built Mercer into an FCS program — takes over with a stocked roster and the weight of following the program's best-ever coach.

The 2026 MAC race will begin to answer the question Toledo's faithful are asking quietly: was the consistent winning about the program's bones or about the man who ran it? The Glass Bowl will be the same; the 35-game streak will be on the wall; the answer is on the field in fall.