But NC Central gets you wound up and ready to come to Peden, right??!!? :-)

I'm actually with you on this. Sure they are a rival and probably the best peer team Ohio will face year-to-year, but there is no fire to make this game what it really should be.

Now...if Marshall were willing to admit that Conference-USA is a sinking ship and came back to the MAC? I might change my tune.

Marshall in the East, Western Kentucky in the West. Make it happen.

Phil Steele's college football preview annually features a toughest schedule page in it each year. In the past decade or so Ohio has been ranked at or near dead last, meaning, it faces one (if not the) easiest schedule in all of college football (FBS). Now, some of it is attributed to playing in the MAC, and facing the MAC East, but the deciding part that separates Ohio from its MAC peers is the non-conference schedule. Ohio is almost always playing the weakest non-conference schedule in the MAC each season. What's more, it also feeds into the fact that Ohio has NEVER beaten a ranked team in its history. That stat still surprises me based on all the years of competition. However, you can't actually beat a ranked team unless you actually play one. And since Solich has arrived, Ohio has faced very few ranked non-conference foes while our MAC peers have faced many more. In some cases, tons more. I for one would love to see Ohio beef up its non-conference schedule. I like the regional matchup of Marshall and I understand the logic of an FCS home game, but the other two each season could be much better. Ohio often takes the route of one bad/mediocre Power Five school and another Group of Five opponent. It would just be nice to see Ohio set its sights higher and mix it up more often by taking on a couple good/ranked Power Five teams as well with those two open games.

The only other close loss to a ranked team that I am recalling was during the Grobe years when the Cats lost to Kansas State 23-20. Another when hopes were high was at OSU when the Cats led heading into the 4th qtr.

Most recent close call would be the last mac title game vs wmu

Interesting, I had made an assumption based on timing of events and scheduling announcements that moving the UC return game farther out than it already was, and it was already originally scheduled several years after the trip to Cincy last year, was at OUr request and not UC's. But it was an assumption and perhaps I am wrong.

OUr schedule consists on one home game and one away game each pat of their own home and home series, a pay-out road game with a P5, and a pay-in home game with an FCS every year. If I recall we had a pay-out game scheduled at Syracuse the same year the home game of the series with Cincy was scheduled. The Syracuse pay-out game got moved to Athens because Syracuse was not sure if planned renovations were going to be complete or something like that. That got turned into a home and home withe first game in Athens. Home and home series with P5s are unusual and having the home game first almost never happens. That, the pay-out game at Penn St. signed for that same year, and the moving of the UC home game years out all happened pretty much at once. I assumed what happened is that we had the opportunity to have the home game with Syracuse as part of a home an home, which is an opportunity that only comes around so often, and that replaced UC as that game on the schedule. Penn St. replaced Syracuse as the pay-out game. UC had to be moved which probably was not hard for UC to accommodate since it was their road game. Someone let me know if they know that this is wrong.

Marshall is usually a very competitive game and Herd fans travel very well.