ADs behind ‘Motor City MACtion’ bullish on potential, hopeful for long-term arrangement

Detroit — It’s no Texas State Fair and unlikely to grow into the world’s largest indoor cocktail party, but Central Michigan’s Amy Folan and Eastern Michigan’s Scott Wetherbee have high hopes for what the planned CMU-EMU football matchups at Ford Field can bring. 

Both athletic directors in interviews with Mitten Football expressed a desire to see the current short-term arrangement become a full-time installment in Michigan’s biggest city and most populous region, likening the concept of playing a rivalry (of sorts) at a neutral site to the Texas-Oklahoma and Florida-Georgia rivalries, both of which get played annually at off-campus neutral sites. 

It’s a concept familiar to Folan, having worked at Georgia and then Texas before taking over at Central Michigan.

“We would like it to be a long term thing,” Folan said. “My master's was from Georgia, I worked at Texas. You have the Georgia-Florida rivalry, Texas-Oklahoma. Those can be great things. And then this for them is close by, and for us, we would usually come down and it's a big part of — all the people that we've serviced and developed are here, and then we need a pipeline of students that understand what we do at CMU.”

What was once something Folan and Wetherbee mused about and tentatively explored has now become “Motor City MACtion” as CMU and EMU will play a midweek game at Ford Field in Detroit the next two seasons, the first coming on Nov. 4 this year with EMU as the host. The partnership between both in-state schools helped the endeavor add up in economic terms. It takes games played in the November weeknight cold into a climate-controlled dome, and both athletic directors talked up having their players experience playing in an NFL stadium. Plus the MAC title game is held there, for whatever aspirational ends one wishes to employ. 

But the ultimate animating forces behind Central Michigan and Eastern Michigan moving this football matchup to Ford FIeld — perhaps for the long haul — lie in a desire to leverage football and athletics to make further inroads for both schools in the Detroit area, where the bulk of their respective alumni reside.  

“There's 250,000 alums of Central Michigan University, which I think people don't realize that footprint is huge,” Folan said. “And the biggest branding and marketing tool any university has in this country is your athletics program. So we take that seriously.”

“It's a great opportunity for us to showcase and our guys love playing in an NFL stadium,” Wetherbee said. “And hopefully we're back there a month later.”