Bill Connelly May 1, 2026, 06:40 AM ET Close Bill Connelly is a writer for ESPN. He covers college football, soccer and tennis. He has been at ESPN since 2019. It feels like I begin my college football preview series each year by telling you how hard life is in the MAC. And it is! The budgets are mostly small by FBS standards, and a lot of the schools are clustered pretty closely together with no inherent recruiting advantages to be found. The MAC's average returning production this year is 10 percentage points below the national average , just as it was 12 percentage points underwater last year. And after averaging an SP+ ranking of 92.0 from 2004 to '18, MAC teams have been at 103.4 since, not including the strange, abbreviated 2020 season. Last year's average ranking of 104.8 was its second worst in that span, too, and that wasn't only because new addition UMass went 0-12 and ranked 136th out of 136.…