All or Nothing: What is Success in 2026?

It’s the first week of college football season. Nobody’s won anything just yet, but maybe the more important thing is that nobody has had to endure the pain that comes after a loss.

Not yet, at least.

Eastern Michigan enters the 2026 season on a downward trajectory. The 2022 team won eight games in the regular season, then capped things with its first bowl victory in 35 years. In 2023, EMU reached a bowl game after a 6-6 regular season, then got clobbered by South Alabama in a bowl. Eastern won five games in 2024, then four in 2025. 

It also enters the season with Chris Creighton in charge of the program for a lucky 13th season. None of the other MAC coaches considered EMU as a contender for the league title this year. With all the returning talent at quarterback, receiver, and defensive back, the coaches put Eastern right in the middle of the league’s pecking order at #7 in the conference’s preseason poll. 

Winning a league title is, after all, the top priority for Eastern Michigan football, isn’t it?

Yes, of course. But if we’re being honest about the odds of EMU going to and winning its first conference championship game since it began being played in 1997 (in Detroit since 2004), then we’ll need to add an important yet hard-to-measure factor to the equation. 

Eastern needs a lot of good luck to be on its side.

Luck, like the kind when your defense isn’t depleted by injury. 

Or the kind of luck when receivers win a high percentage of those deep, ‘50-50’ balls thrown by their risk-taking quarterback.

Or the kind of luck when the other team’s quarterback Dan Orlovsky (verb) themselves. Or when an opponent punts the ball backwards. Sometimes coaches over-stimulate themselves out of wins. That'll work, too.

For Eastern Michigan to be in position to go to Detroit in December, it’ll require a top-2 finish in the league’s standings at the end of the year. Toledo was incredibly unlucky in the way last year’s 3-way tiebreaker for the #2 spot. Had Toledo been in a 2-way tie with either Ohio or Miami, it would’ve gone to Detroit to face Western Michigan. But, without, as noted by The Blade, without rules language that disqualifies a tied team for having lost to the other two tied teams, Miami (which lost to Ohio and Toledo) stayed alive and wound up winning the tiebreaker.

I don’t think Toledo’s exactly looking for favors, and I doubt that group is looking for excuses for not making a MAC championship game after it lost 28-23 to its biggest rival, Bowling Green. But if some non-football players would’ve included some language that would’ve benefited Toledo through the tiebreaking process, would Rocket fans view their 2025 any more favorably than they currently do? 

Would beating WMU in Detroit after losing to the team by one point in Kalamazoo make the pain of losing to Eddie George and the Falcons any easier to cope with?

Eastern Michigan is one of three MAC teams to not reach the MAC championship game in Detroit. The other two are UMass, which re-joined the league last year after a brief stint in the mid-2010s, and Sacramento State, which, as you know, will play its first-ever MAC game in just four days. 

Everybody else has made it at least twice. 

EMU’s 9-4 season in 2022 that ended with a big bowl victory and a fry bath (and, later, an extension) for Creighton was wildly successful for some, but equally unsuccessful for others. A letdown loss to Toledo kept EMU from winning the now-defunct West division outright. EMU lost the head-to-head tiebreaker to keep the team from its first league championship appearance, and it hasn’t come as close to clinching since. 

If, at the end of any football season, there's no conference championship trophy for a team to show off in a display case to prove its season was actually a successful one, then does that mean this sport is cluttered with hundreds of failing teams and thousands and thousands of failures running around in helmets and pads?

That just doesn’t seem right.

So let me finally ask you, dear EMU fan, something that I’ve been thinking about a little bit more over the past few days.

What does success mean to you and your team in 2026? 

How would you, the assumed Eastern Michigan football fan and enjoyer, define it for what this team can accomplish this year? Or any year for that matter?

Certainly, having enough hope for a team like EMU means you always want a perfect, undefeated football season to happen from your favorite college team. Just like how I also want to, suddenly, be born into a disgustingly wealthy family. 

If EMU legitimately shocks the college football world by making the 12-team playoff, I’m here for it. You’ll never, ever be happy if this is your approach to having standards for sports teams, though. If this is the only way to view success, then you’re probably perpetually miserable, and that’s simply not good for your blood pressure. Stress is a silent killer, and EMU football missing the CFP will not be what the doctors say killed you.

This is totally negotiable. A MAC title win is certainly a desired prize, but how cool is EMU’s fanbase if second place is good enough? 

Or what if EMU actually finished out on top? Maybe it loses once in conference play. Maybe it loses two league games. Maybe EMU goes undefeated through MAC play and has its best regular season since 1987 and goes to Detroit as the conference’s top dog. 

At face value, it’s more impressive to go to the MAC Championship game these days when the final standings say you had a top-2 season among 13 teams than it was to win an East or West division that had six or seven teams each.

If EMU got its feet through the doors of Ford Field on its regular-season performance, would that be good enough to call it a success — even if EMU lost when it mattered most? Or does the MAC title game not actually matter all that much?

EMU isn’t playing in the Big Ten. It isn’t playing in the SEC. It’s not a school where, as I already mentioned, the CFP is on the list of expectations, because that’s just a dishonest standard.

Winning the MAC title, though, is conceivably in EMU’s control. It can’t control how good the other MAC teams might be, but playing its way to Detroit and accomplishing something that its fanbase has never seen before is, on paper, the best-possible feeling to chase.

There’s one more thing worth considering here too. It’s been 13 years of Creighton at the helm. 

Creighton has certainly afforded himself time and patience from his team’s supporters with six bowl game appearances in nine seasons, and the team has been more competitive than they’ve seen in years before his hiring. 

It’s been 4,633 days since Creighton was hired to win a MAC title, and EMU still hasn’t even reached the championship game. If there’s still no league title at the end of the 2026 season, how much more patience will EMU fans have for the team’s leadership?

The classic would you rather every college football fan should think about at least once a year, I believe. Would you rather beat only your rivals and lose all the other games, or win all of your other games if that meant losing only to your rivals?

Maybe we don’t have to be so extreme here, but it’s undeniably important for EMU to beat its rivals.

Why? Because it’s college football. That’s why.

Also, it’d be a turnaround for this team if it came away with wins over Western and Central. Creighton is 0-3 vs. WMU since Lance Taylor was hired, and lost by 11 points to Matt Drinkall in his fifth game as CMU’s coach. 

Also (pt. 2): the CMU game is going to be in Ford Field for the first time since 2004, when EMU won 61-58 after four overtimes. It’s a nice, temporary stage for the rivalry game, and would be a fun place for EMU to come away with a win. 

Some bowls are more impressive than others, and more football can be better than less football. Bowl games, though, feel like bigger afterthoughts for this team since it actually won one pretty recently. EMU won one in 2022, so there’s not a decades-long drought of victories clouding over the program’s head. 

A bowl victory should always be celebrated, but would a bowl victory (and no MAC title bid) make a team’s season definitively successful?

In life, pain is guaranteed. Joy is optional. If Eastern Michigan loses to two teams that may or may not have any business being MAC teams in the first place (says the EMU football writer) and somehow ekes out six wins and a bowl game invite, it’ll be hard to call this a successful year because, frankly, this doesn’t sound like a fun time at all. 

Success and failure are defined by the lines you choose to conjure. But maybe these things can also be measured by the moments we consider ourselves to be just lucky enough in the first place.