Wayne State running back Josh Renel (Rochester Adams) was one of 12 Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference athletes (six male, six female) to receive the Commissioner's Award for the fall season.

The award honors those who excel both in the classroom, and on the field of play.

A junior running back for Wayne State, Renel holds a 3.69 GPA with a double major of business administration and marketing, earning CoSIDA Academic All-District honors and a spot on the GLIAC All-Academic team for football, both for the second year in a row.

On the field, he was the only player in NCAA Division II football to break the 2,000 all-purpose yard plateau for the regular season, earning All-GLIAC honors as a runner and return specialist, and all-region honors from Hansen's Football Gazette.

Academic All-MAC teams announced

Oakland County was also well represented when the Mid-American Conference recently announced its all-academic teams.

Central Michigan University placed four players on the all-academic team, including Milford's Mike Petrucci and Rochester Adams' Cody Wilson, while Novi Detroit Catholic Central grad Scott Kovanda was one of Ball State's three representatives.

A junior linebacker, Petrucci carries a 3.70 GPA in mathematics, while Wilson, a sophomore wide receiver, has a 3.91 GPA. Kovanda, a junior punter, carries a 3.95 GPA in business.

Miami (Ohio) defensive end Jason Semmes (Orchard Lake St. Mary's) and Bowling Green center Ben Bojicic (Farmington Hills Harrison) earned honorable mention.

Central Michigan junior middle hitter Kaitlyn Schultz was named the Mid-American Conference Offensive Player of the Week this week.

The Milford grad — two seasons removed from being the second Chippewa ever to earn conference Freshman of the Year honors — recorded a 22-kill, six-block weekend as the Chippewas swept a pair of MAC matches against Bowling Green and Miami (Ohio).

Schultz ranks second in kills (180) and first in blocks (62) for CMU (9-11, 3-5 MAC), ranking among the conference leaders in both hitting and blocking.

The Central Michigan University Chippewas, coming off a 13-10 overtime road loss to MAC East preseason favorite Temple, got back on the winning track with an easy 52-14 win over winless Eastern Michigan. The Eagles (0-3) are on a 15-game losing skid, but had a chance to win each of their first two contests, and had given CMU fits in the last few years.

Where would Central Michigan be without Cody Wilson this season?

Well, probably still 1-1 after two Thursday contests — but still, it's clear that just two games into the Dan Enos era, the Chippewa offense — in serious flux after the departure of the record-setting trio of Dan LeFevour, Antonio Brown and Bryan Anderson — is dependent on the contributions of the 5-foot-10 sophomore from Rochester Adams.

Wilson's big play — an 81-yard kick return — set up CMU's first score in Week One's 33-0 shutout of Hampton, and the diminutive wideout made a similar game-altering play — a 70-yard reception — to set up the Chippewas' only TD in a 13-10 overtime loss to MAC East Division favorite Temple.

What's more, Wilson — who accounted for a full half (188 yards) of CMU's total offensive output Thursday — played a bit of quarterback in the Wildcat formation, running it well enough to help set up kicker David Harman's 31-yard, game-tying field goal to send the contest to overtime.
In all, Wilson has 344 all-purpose yards so far this season, on just 21 touches, averaging out to 16.4 yards per play.

The only flaw? Finishing.

Both of Wilson's big plays saw him get caught on the doorstep of the end zone, something that teammates teased him about after the opener. Both plays set up a short TD dive by a running back, though, so I can't imagine the teasing was too harsh.

For full disclosure, Wilson did have a fumble after a reception in the first half, one that — coming as it did on CMU's half of the field — could have cost the Chippewas, but teammate Matt Berning took him off the hook by forcing a fumble from Temple quarterback Chester Stewart a few plays later.

DETROIT — As the dean of Mid-American Conference coaches, Western Michigan’s Bill Cubit knows as well as anyone what flies in the league, and what doesn’t.

And he’s not necessarily buying the assertion — put forward by the media-voted preseason poll unveiled at Friday’s MAC Media Day at Ford Field — that Central Michigan’s reign atop the league is done.

“It’s hard to beat the champion. I’m a Philly fan, and I’m watching what’s going on there (with the Phillies). Everyone leaves them for dead and all of a sudden — hey, the kids know how to win,” said the fifth-year Broncos coach of the archrival Chippewas, who have won three of the last four MAC titles, and won the in-state rivalry game four straight years. “I told somebody, until somebody beats them, they’ve got the right to say anything they want.”

Understandably, the members of the MAC media contingent were voting with an eye on how many of those “winning” kids returned for CMU, noting the league-low 41 returning lettermen. Most glaring in his absence is record-setting quarterback Dan LeFevour, and not just because his giant picture — which loomed over the entrance to Ford Field for two years, from across the street on the outfield wall of Comerica Park — is no longer up on a promotional billboard.

A sixth-round pick of his hometown Chicago Bears in the NFL draft, LeFevour is gone from the league he’d helped dominate throughout his four-year career, and so are his two favorite targets, Antonio Brown and Bryan Anderson. For that matter, so is his coach, Butch Jones, who bolted for Cincinnati.

For all that the MAC has been a quarterback-driven league — from Byron Leftwich, Chad Pennington and Ben Roethlisberger to Charlie Frye, Josh Cribbs and Bruce Gradkowski — you can’t just vote based on name-recognition at the QB position, Cubit insisted. Just look at his own team from a year ago.

“We had the least amount of starters back, but because you have a quarterback — that’s a media thing, to look at that. I knew it was going to be (a rough year). I was hoping it wasn’t going to be as bad,” said Cubit, who grimaced when his Broncos were picked for a close second behind CMU last year, only to finish a distant third, with a 5-7 record. “Still, we’re about three plays away from going 7-5, and making a bowl game with a bunch of young kids. ... I really think we’re going to be a lot better off, in that respect, but now everybody looks and says, ‘Well, you don’t have a quarterback.’ ”

True, the Broncos also graduated a decorated signalcaller in Tim Hiller — who made it to training camp with the Indianapolis Colts — but Cubit isn’t buying that the Broncos will fall off a cliff without Hiller, especially given the supporting cast inherited by his likely replacement, sophomore Alex Carder.

“We had a deficiency on the offensive line ... and the easiest thing was to put it on Tim’s shoulders. We don’t have to do that this year,” said Cubit, noting the maturity of his offensive line, which will enable the Broncos to be more smash-mouth again. “It’s the surrounding guys that make it (work). That’s probably what hurt Tim last year: Our surrounding guys weren’t as good as the year before. ... I think there’s a little hesitation (in voting), because there aren’t as many quarterbacks returning as there have been in the past. And quarterbacks (that) are going to play well, those teams are going to win, and if they don’t play well, you’re not going to win. But you’ve gotta have some guys around them.”

The Broncos were picked to finish third in the MAC West, behind Northern Illinois and CMU. The Huskies had dipped the last few years under longtime coach Joe Novak, but have come back under second-year coach Jerry Kill, after a very quick retooling of the program.

With CMU’s recent success — four straight bowl games, capped by the program’s first-ever Top 25 ranking last fall — new Chippewa coach Dan Enos knows he’s probably not even going to have the luxury of even that kind of time.

“Even if ... the perception is maybe you have a little time, or you don’t, whatver — coaches, we put it on ourselves, anyway. As a coach, you never say, ‘Oh, we have some time. If we win four games, five games this year, we’re OK,’ ” said Enos, who came to CMU from his alma mater, Michigan State.

“I think it’s a total positive that we’re at a place that has high expectations, because if you think about what the opposite end of it can be, if there were no expectations, that’d be tough. It’d be tough on the players and the coaches. One thing that our coaches have commented on since we’ve been there is that our football team expects to win. When you take over a football team that maybe hasn’t won ... part of your process is trying to get into the mindset of your players, that they have to learn how to expect to win, and learn what it takes to win. And I don’t think we’ve had to spend a whole lot of time talking with our players about expectations, and what it takes to win. ... The previous two staffs did an outstanding job of building a culture where guys expect to do that.”

Unfortunately, a coach who knows all too well what it’s like being on the opposite end of that spectrum is Eastern Michigan’s Ron English. After an 0-12 campaign in his first season a year ago, the Eagles lost 14 players to graduation, and another 25 to other forms of attrition.

English understands all too well the rebuilding project he’s been handed.

“I was talking to a friend of my family last night. He’s from Detroit, and I said, ‘Look Wayne, if you go to Detroit right now, and you buy one of these old houses, are you going to try to refurbish it, or are you going to knock the thing down and start over?’ You’re going to knock it down and start over,” English said. “That’s really what we did (at EMU), to be honest with you. We said we’re going to take a hit here, but we’re not going to tread water. We’re going to knock the thing down and start over.”

The MAC season kicks off with five non-conference games on Thursday, Sept. 2, and the league season commences with a doozy, when CMU visits Temple, the team tabbed to win the MAC East, on Sept. 9.

Entering the final day of the regular season on Thursday (March 4), any team in the top half of the Mid-American Conference's West Division could still claim all or part of the division crown, depending on how the night's games shake out.

At least old rivals Eastern Michigan and Central Michigan — both 8-7 in the league — have their destinies in their own hands when they meet at 6:30 p.m. at EMU's Convocation Center. The game will be televised on Fox Sports Net Detroit.

Ball State (also 8-7) can earn a share of the title with the EMU/CMU winner by beating host Western Michigan Thursday night.
The loser of the EMU/CMU contest could fall as far as eighth, while the winner could be as high as the No. 2 seed in the upcoming MAC tournament at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland.

CMU, which beat the Eagles the last two meetings with EMU — in last year's MAC tournament, then again with a 62-49 win in Mount Pleasant earlier this season — owned a share of last year's regular-season division title as well, its third since 1998. A win Thursday would let the fourth-year coach Ernie Zeigler's Chippewas (14-14) finish over .500 both overall and in the conference for the first time since the Chris Kaman-led Chippewas won the MAC and advanced to the second round of the NCAA tournament in 2003. That's a good sign for a program that's only had nine winning seasons since joining Division I in the 1972-73 school year.

For coach Charles Ramsey's Eagles (16-13), it's hardly the only big news on the Ypsilanti campus. The EMU women have already secured the No. 2 seed in the MAC tournament, while the EMU men's swimming and diving team — the perennial class of the conference with a MAC-record 28 titles, including the last three in a row — will help host the conference championships at Jones Natatorium, starting with prelims on Thursday.

Meanwhile in Mount Pleasant, the eight-time MAC champion CMU wrestling team — ranked in the top 10 in the nation — will host the MAC championships at Rose Center this weekend, March 6-7.