Aug 12, 2001

By RUSTY MILLER
AP Sports Writer

Rick Chryst, commissioner of the Mid-American Conference, knows exactly where his league stands in the major-college football world.

"The top end of this league can play with anybody," he said. "We're coming off our best year ever against the Big Ten. We won at three Big Ten institutions: Penn State, Iowa and Minnesota."

Take that, big guys.

By top end, Chryst is referring to Marshall, Western Michigan and Toledo, which could come up with a few surprise non-conference wins while again fighting it out for the MAC title.

Toledo went 10-1 and just missed the Top 25 in the final rankings. Only five teams in Division I-A had better records, yet the Rockets didn't go to a bowl game because their loss to Western Michigan cost them the MAC's West Division title.

"We know that our team deserved to be in a bowl last year," new Toledo coach Tom Amstutz said. "That is a definite motivating factor for us this year."

That snub may have been rectified by Chryst, who locked up a spot for the MAC's No. 2 team in the new GMAC Bowl. The champion will go to the Motor City Bowl for the fifth year in a row.

Even if there weren't another bowl spot available, Toledo has the firepower to grab one anyway. The Rockets return 16 starters including a pair of returning first-team All-MAC performers in tailback Chester Taylor and quarterback Tavares Bolden.

Taylor scored 18 touchdowns while rushing for 134 yards a game, seventh best in the country. Bolden threw just four interceptions while passing for 1,597 yards and 13 TDs.

Gary Pinkel bolted the Rockets after a 73-37-3 record in 10 years to become the school's winningest coach, taking the job at Missouri. He was replaced by Amstutz, architect of the MAC's best defense. One of his first moves, however, was announcing that the Rockets would go to a spread offense.

"When I was defensive coordinator, it was always the wide-open offenses that gave me nightmares," Amstutz said. "Now that I'm a head coach, I want to give other teams those same nightmares."

Western Michigan won the last two MAC West titles and each time lost to Marshall - at Marshall, a sore spot for West coaches. Toledo won the West the two years before that, also losing both times at Marshall in the MAC title game.

This year the title game will be played on the home field of the West winner, buoying the hopes of half the league. The rest of the MAC has watched Marshall pocket the MAC's bowl berth each of the four years the Thundering Herd have been in the league since moving up from Division I-AA.

"We're tired of being the defending MAC West champions," said Western coach Gary Darnell, whose team lost 19-14 to Marshall in the 2000 title game.

Quarterback Chris Welsh is back for the Broncos, but two of the top players in the huddle are gone. Steve Neal, the MAC's all-time leading receiver (235 catches for 3,599 yards) has graduated, along with league MVP Robert Sanford, WMU's career leading rusher (4,219 yards).

Rounding out the West are Ball State, which had the nation's longest losing streak at 21 in a row before finishing 5-2 down the stretch last year; Northern Illinois; Eastern Michigan and Central Michigan.

Everyone in the East - five Ohio colleges (Ohio, Miami, Akron, Bowling Green and Kent State) and Buffalo - is chasing perennial power Marshall.

The Herd are 27-3 while winning the last four East titles and are once again the team to beat. Marshall was a clear-cut favorite to repeat in preseason media balloting, but that's of little consolation to coach Bob Pruett.

"We don't worry about where the media picks us - they've picked us in a lot of spots," he said. "Our goal is to win a championship every year, no matter what anyone else expects."

A year ago, Marshall was searching for a replacement for quarterback Chad Pennington, an NFL draft pick who was fifth in the Heisman balloting. Up stepped Byron Leftwich, who passed for 3,358 yards and 21 touchdowns with just nine interceptions.

Now Pruett must fill in voids left by the loss of more than half the starters on each side of the ball, including most of the secondary and wide receivers.

No one around the MAC is feeling sorry for him.

"Someone has to beat Marshall and we hope it is us," Miami coach Terry Hoeppner said. "In the mid-'70s, the road to the MAC title went through Oxford. Now it goes through Huntington. That will be true until someone changes it."