The past few years, Temple has been the pivotal game to go to the MAC championship (sans the Kent State mess on Black Friday a couple years ago).  With them gone, who will be our biggest opponent to get to Detroit? 

All of this assuming we continue our success, of course.

Obviously Akron will have massive improvement this year, but it will take a few years for even a good coach to get them from where they were to where Ohio is. Solich has a 7 year head start, and Knorr was a better coach than iCoach, who really took the Akron program the wrong direction (despite having malls).

As for the others, Kent had a pretty good coach, but even he couldn't get over the hump, and now they are starting over, so I doubt they will be competitive any more. Buffalo? They will be OK, I guess. U. Mass may become competitive, but I don't think they start out that way. Miami is a merry go round for coaches, but there will be some years they are competitive, so I went with them. BG also has a decent chance of being the most difficult rival, as they have a good coach, and more coaching stability.

Ohio probably won't win every year, but I'd guess that over the next 5 years they have the best winning percentage in the East.

Fiami will always be our rival, there will be no taking that away.  But they haven't been as big of a game as Temps the past few years, with the championship being on the line vs. them.  We seemed to play Temple better than a lot of other teams (KENT )

My guess is going to be Akron.  Top notch football stadium, a coach who has been on the big time.  May be like basketball where the MAC championship game rests on us vs. them (well, in football just to get there, but I digress...)

The cool thing is that, unlike what would happen at many schools, Solich was given the time to build the program. When 2007 slipped back to 6-6, and 2008 to 4-8, there was some grumbling, but people could see that the program was still making progress. At many schools that would have been the time to change, and 2009-2010-2011 would never have happened. Ohio is a lucky school, and has truly great fans, and they deserve all the successes they have had, and more.

at this point I feel like we have seen the enemy and the enemy is us, I don't think we have a nemesis. Maybe I'm still high from flying around in Sweet 16 Land but I look at the MAC East in football and think we should beat every team by 20 pts. With our schedule as a whole anything less than 11-1 going into Detroit will be a disappointment.

in spite of all the great success last year we realistically should have finished 13-1 with a MACC. 13-1 or 14-0 is within reach again this year and we need to grab it, its a critical time with bball stepping up in a big way, let's finish in the top 25 in both sports next year.

Not a MAC East nemesis, but I suspect Marshall will have our game circled heading into the season.

I think they'll be more worried about the CUSA games, but after the beatdown we gave them in Athens I bet this is pretty high on their list.

Probably not.  We're a MAC school, unworthy of that much attention to the Mighty Herd.  Just revenge.

I think the problems with Kent were due to Doug Martin, who was a good coach, but he's gone.

While it's true that that was Ohio's lowest point output of the year, and it's true that Kent was 3rd behind Temple, it's not like Kent was any threat to win the game against Ohio. Kent had only a bit over 200 yards of total offense, 4 turnovers, and only one long drive. We'll have to see how it goes in the future, I guess.