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100 Days, 100 Reasons G6 Football Matters
No. 100: MACtion
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Sign Up FreeEvery November, the Mid-American Conference takes over your television on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Snow falling sideways in Kalamazoo. A 63-point shootout in DeKalb. Some quarterback you’ve never heard of throwing five touchdowns in 30-degree weather while 11,000 people lose their minds in the stands.
They call it MACtion. It started in 2000 as a scheduling workaround — ESPN needed content on weeknights, and the MAC needed exposure. What nobody expected was that it would become one of the most beloved traditions in college football.
The MAC doesn’t have the budgets. It doesn’t have the recruiting rankings. It doesn’t have the TV deals that fund indoor practice facilities and seven-figure assistant coach salaries. What it has is football on a Tuesday night in November when nothing else is on — and that turned out to be enough.
MACtion works because it’s authentic. These aren’t made-for-TV spectacles. They’re football games played in bad weather by kids who chose these programs because they wanted to play, not because a five-star ranking told them where to go. The product is raw, unpredictable and genuinely fun.
The numbers back it up. MACtion games regularly draw over a million viewers on ESPN. Each midweek broadcast generates roughly $6 million in exposure value for the conference. For a league that operates on a fraction of Power 4 resources, that’s not a scheduling gimmick — it’s a business model.
Toledo and Bowling Green separated by 25 miles on I-75. Western Michigan and Central Michigan splitting the state. Ohio and Miami (Ohio) fighting over the Bricks. These rivalries don’t need a primetime Saturday slot to matter. They just need a Tuesday night and a snowstorm.
That’s G6 football. Make it work with what you’ve got. Turn a limitation into an identity. Own it.
MACtion is way more fun than P4 bottom feeders. And deep down, everybody knows it.
They told you it didn’t matter. Here are 100 reasons it does.
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Tim Stephens
Founder & CEO
Tim Stephens has spent nearly 40 years at the intersection of sports and technology — from small-town newspapers to leading day-to-day newsroom strategy for CBSSports.com. He founded Diehard Sports Network to cover the programs the industry forgot.
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