An absurdly premature assessment of the 2011 Chippewas.
? Previously On…
There are two kinds of tough coaching jobs in college football: The ones that leave you gasping in an atmosphere of hopelessness, and the ones that erect pillars of false hope. When Dan Enos accepted the Central Michigan job last January, he was pretty clearly stepping into the latter, and not for nothing. The Chippewas had just taken three MAC championships in four years from 2006-09 on the strength of five eventual NFL draft picks, two competent head coaches (Brian Kelly and Butch Jones), and one dynamic quarterback, Dan LeFevour, a four-year starter who left as the owner of every conceivable school record and the NCAA record for total touchdowns in a career. Enos inherited the cream of the conference, and found an almost empty dish.
Still, no one expected his first go-round to be quite as bad as it was — 3-9, with easy early wins over Hampton and Eastern Michigan followed by a single win in the last nine — and in some ways it wasn't: The offense was a little above average by MAC standards, the defense just mediocre. But the 2010 Chippewas were bad in the very specific ways that make kind-of bad teams truly awful. They finished dead last in the conference in turnover margin. They blew five games decided by a touchdown or less, four of them as the direct result of a woeful kicking game. They lost because the offense couldn't score; they lost because the defense couldn't stop the run; they lost because the defense couldn't stop the pass. They lost in the final seconds both by giving up the winning points and failing to score the winning points themselves. Obviously, it didn't take long to lose whatever shreds of momentum carried over from the triumph of 2009, too.
? The Big Change. Five Chippewas showed up as first or second-team all-conference picks last December, and four of them are gone. The first-teamers, linebackers Matt Berning and Nick Bellore, leave with 782 career tackles between them in 87 combined starts; Bellore alone started 52 of 53 games over four years, racked up 100-plus total stops in all four and was voted first-team All-MAC each of the last three. (He ended his career with more tackles than any other active player in the country; opposing offensive coordinators still mutter his name in their sleep.) On the other side, offensive linemen Colin Miller and Jeff Maddux go out with 93 career starts, most of them as members of the most prolific offense in the league.
| The Least You Should Know About... |
 Central Michigan |
| ?? In 2010 |
| 3-9 (2-6 MAC); Lost eight of last nine. |
| ?? Past Five Years |
| 2006-10: 41-26 (32-10 MAC); MAC championships in 2006, '07 and '09. |
| ?? Five-Year Recruiting Rankings* |
| 2007-11: N/A (No classes ranked in Rivals' top 50 nationally.). |
| ?? Best Player |
 Wide receiver Cody Wilson's numbers last year stood in inverse proportion to his size: At 5-10, 186 pounds (probably recorded immediately after a huge meal, while dripping wet), Wilson came up big as a sophomore with a team-high 83 catches for 1,137 yards —�35 of those grabs coming in the last three games alone. His consistency earned Wilson a second-team All-MAC nod from league coaches, a team MVP nod from teammates and an Academic All-MAC nod for his 3.9 GPA in marketing. |
| ?? Best Year Ever |
 His 21st Century successors probably know Gary Hogeboom better from Survivor: Guatemala, but before his turn with the Yaxha Tribe —�not to mention four different NFL teams over a 10-year career —�he honed his survival skills as quarterback of the 1979 Chippewas: CMU won three different games by one or two points and dueled Toledo to a 7-7 tie, a loss in any of which would have cost the Chips their first MAC title. Instead, they finished unblemished, 10-0-1, for the first (and still only) time since joining the conference in 1972. And while Hogeboom starred as the MAC Offensive Player of the Year, the defense led the charge by pitching four shutouts over the course of the season. |
| ?? Best Case |
| Radcliff and Wilson connect for the MAC's most high-octane passing game while cutting the turnovers; the kicking game finds some consistency; the defense holds its ground in the middle of the pack. 7-5, Humanitarian Bowl. |
| ?? Worst Case |
| See 2010: Nonexistent running game, turnover-prone passing game, vulnerable run defense, inconsistent kicking. 4-8, Dan Enos enters 2012 fighting for his job. |
| * Based on Rivals' national rankings (top 50 only) |
All of the veterans —�eight outgoing senior starters in all —�will be missed for their experience, but not only because of the quantity: With the vets go the strongest remaining connections to the championship teams of the LeFevour years, the part of the team most accustomed to thinking of themselves as champions and most likely to know what it takes to get back. Only a handful of regular starters from the '09 team remain (five, by my count), all of them role players.
? Big Men On Campus. The only aspect of last year's team that seemed more or less functional (interception issues notwithstanding; see below) was the passing game, which successfully deployed a brand new quarterback (Ryan Radcliff) and go-to receiver (Cody Wilson) with no discernible drop-off in overall explosiveness. Radcliff went over 300 yards in six different games, and connected on multiple touchdown passes in six.
He also put the ball in the air about 39 times per game, more than any other MAC QB, which cast the impressive numbers in a much less favorable light, efficiency-wise: Radcliff served up multiple interceptions in five different games, and wound up deadlocked at 17 TDs, 17 INTs for the year. With no discernible running threat, scoring plummeted by almost 10 points per game.
As a first-year sophomore starter, though, Radcliff at least demonstrated that he has the arm and the brain to do everything the offense needs him to do in any given situation — i.e. complete a high percentage of the easy throws and occasionally threaten the secondary downfield. He also finished strong. With a full season under his belt to iron out some of the consistency/decision-making issues a respected new coach focused almost exclusively on his game, Radcliff and Wilson shouldn't have much competition as the most productive pass-catch combo in the conference.
? Open Casting. The kicking game featured a three-man rotation comprised entirely of freshmen, which would have been funny if it weren't so tragic. The vast majority of the reps went to David Harman, who earned them by being generally accurate on field goals (9 of 12 for the year). Those three misses, though, happened to come in a three-point loss against Bowling Green; a one-point loss against Navy; and a five-point loss against Northwestern, which blocked three separate Harman kicks — a field goal and two extra points —�to provide the final margin of victory.
But Harman was still much better than his cohorts, Paul Mudgett and Richie Hogan, who combined to make just one of eight field goals, including a miss by Mudgett in an eventual three-point loss at Temple in September. Throw in the exit of punter Brett Hartman, right leg behind the worst net punting average in the MAC, and there is much opportunity for growth.
? Overly optimistic spring narrative. Radcliff and Wilson give the offense a clear identity in the passing game, which really began to blossom down the stretch. The other problems (aside from the nonexistent running game) were almost intangible, and therefore bound to improve: Simply, there's no way the Chippewas can be bad or unlucky enough again to suffer so many untimely kicking gaffes and finish at the bottom of the MAC in turnover margin two years in a row. Those are correctable issues that can immediately lead to more wins even with no improvement in the down-to-down, blocking and tackling aspects.
? The Big Question. Can they stop the run at all? Last year's run D was spotty, alternating a few respectable afternoons with some gore feasts: Ball State rolled up 306 on the ground, Northern Illinois ran for 282, Navy for 437 and five touchdowns. (Virginia Tech also ground out 230 and four touchdowns on 8.2 yards per carry on Oct. 9, but that's probably to be expected from Virginia Tech against a MAC also-ran.) That left CMU ranked 81st nationally/10th in the MAC against the run, and that's with two senior linebackers, Berning and Bellore, who cleaned up every other tackle. More straight-ahead attacks may find it unusually easy going between the tackles, and if they do, the Chippewas' own attack will spend most of its time (again) trying to gun its way out of catch-up mode.
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Other premature assessments (in alphabetical order): Iowa State. … Marshall. … Nebraska. … Nevada. … South Florida. … Syracuse.
Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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