Broc Lowry leads from the front, and led Western Michigan to a MAC title game

Kalamazoo — Broc Lowry leans back casually in one of the black, faux-leather chairs in the lobby of Western Michigan’s Bill Brown Alumni Football Center and thinks back to the day two months prior that changed his college career. 

Lowry’s relaxed, placid demeanor recounting his efforts to secure the starting quarterback job for the Broncos is part of the equation for what suits him to the role. He doesn’t flinch, his pulse steady as the game and stadium roar around him. 

“Broc’s got a pretty good poker face,” head coach Lance Taylor said.

It wasn’t poker on Sept. 20 against Toledo in Waldo Stadium, but the Broncos made a bold bet, starting Lowry for the first time all season amidst a quarterback battle between him and JUCO transfer Brady Jones that bled into the season. Western Michigan, already 0-3 at that point, really couldn’t afford to start 0-4 and attain its goals. After trailing most of the game, the Broncos got the ball for a last-gasp drive, down 13-6. 

Lowry opened with three incompletions in a row before completing a pass on 4th and 10 to Tailique Williams that the receiver took for 43 yards to the Toledo five yard line. With under a minute to play, Lowry bulldozed into the end zone for a touchdown and Taylor stuck with his bold initial choice to go for two, and again put the ball in Lowry’s hands. 

And as Lowry crashed across the goal line inside the right pylon on the west end zone at Waldo Stadium, the home crowd erupted and, in the stands, Michele Lowry, his mother, cried tears of joy and relief. 

“I just wanted him to get a chance,” Michele said. “And I knew in the Toledo game — I was crying after the game because I knew if he did not do good in that game, I did not think he was going to get a chance again. So I was overjoyed with happiness that he did well and they won and I was, that was probably the happiest moment for me.”

By the following Monday, Taylor made it official: Broc Lowry, QB1. 

“Broc will be our quarterback as we move forward,” Taylor said then.

Lowry, a transfer from Indiana in 2024, won the starting job by playing the only way he knows how to on a football field: Aggressively, borderline recklessly, from the front. He’s not a typically rah rah leader because that is not how he’s wired, or needs to be. What he could otherwise verbalize is conveyed clearly with each hit Lowry takes, every block he throws and in all the times he happily pushes a pile. It’s not just that he’s productive, but a fearless presence at a position defined by risk. 

Lowry leads from the front, by example, gladly stepping first into the breach for a Western Michigan team that has gone 8-1 with him starting at quarterback. And Lowry’s stoic, stirring presence, all the touchdown drives he’s led and hits he’s taken, have guided Western Michigan to a MAC title berth vs. Miami (OH) at noon on Saturday at Ford Field. 

“I'm not the most rah rah guy on the team,” Lowry said, getting comfortable in his seat. “But you know, I will fight for my guys and lay a block for my running backs if they need one.”

Lowry’s leadership is natural, at least from what his high school coach, Mike Pavlansky, remembers. 

Pavlansky and his Canfield High School staff had returned to their facilities late one Thursday night after scouting a future opponent when the head coach noticed some kids on bikes on the field. He went out to see who it was, and likely planned on shooing them away. 

He got closer and saw it was Lowry, then a ninth grader, with some of his teammates. A single light was on in the corner of the field, casting enough light for them to throw some passes. 

“I said, 'Guys, great to see you.' Talking a little bit and, 'What are you doing here?'” Pavlansky recalled saying. “Lights are off. They said, 'Coach, there's a few lights on, we're going to throw some passes.' They were just there to have fun and throw some passes, but that's who he was. He got guys at 9:30, 10 o'clock on a Thursday night to come to the stadium. There was a small light on the corner somewhere in the stadium, there's enough light to throw passes in one area. And that's what he wanted to do.”

And what’s impressive to Pavlansky is, to some extent, how this is all second nature for Lowry. Playing football with his teammates and friends is just what he wants to be doing. 

During the Covid-19 pandemic, when Lowry and his high school teammates were largely sequestered to their own lives and not spending the usual hours and days practicing and working out together, the quarterback found a place to hold out-of-sight throwing sessions. 

And while the grass airstrip at the Mahoning Valley Joint Vocational School — about an eighth of a mile to the northwest of the Canfield High School football field, just across a bike path and through some wooded area — wasn’t likely designed with high school football practice in mind, it became the venue for Lowry and his friends to rep football and have some normalcy. 

“That's just how I was growing up,” Lowry said. “You know like during COVID, me and my friends would be on our bikes, go on the bike trail and there was like this little airstrip, like grass airstrip we'd go to, so no one would really see us outside, 'cause it was kind of frowned upon. We were just playing catch in the woods, you know. Just backyard football games in the woods during COVID”

Lowry’s leadership is one part innate, just something to the way he’s wired, and another part his outward actions. Pavlansky remembers there’s little that the quarterback wouldn’t do to try and win, and Chase Lowry, the middle of the Lowry sons, remembers his younger brother being this way all the way back to childhood. 

Growing up with two older brothers helps, of course. Lowry played running back and receiver growing up before flipping to quarterback full time. Chase recalled that if he and Broc fought during a youth football practice, they’d be in the backyard with their dad, Tim, after practice doing Oklahoma drills to work out the aggression.

“It'd be like, he gets me sometimes, I'd get him sometimes,” Chase said. “But I think that's where it came from, mostly. Just him growing up and all of that stuff happening to him for so long.”

And playing the quarterback position with a running back’s disposition is part of what makes Lowry such a good football player. That the athleticism and requisite size came with age was the necessary luck of the draw to make Lowry the sort of player Pavlansky and Co. knew they could do something special with. 

“I played basketball and some teams they would beat in football, some of the kids would be like 'Your brother the quarterback?'” Chase said, recalling some interactions from high school. “And I'd be like, 'Yeah.' And he goes, 'Ah, that kid's really good.'”

Lowry got called up to the Canfield varsity squad and started as a sophomore, as that year and his junior year the team fell short in the state playoffs. During his senior season, Lowry and the class of 28 seniors playing football for Canfield made history, getting over the hump into the state finals and winning a Division III state crown.

Lowry finished with five total touchdowns in that game, a 35-14 win. He rushed for three, passed for another and caught a 69-yard touchdown pass to lead Canfield to its first state championship in school history. 

“It took Broc's class to knock the door down,” Pavlansky said. “In 2005, we were in a state championship game and got beat by Toledo Central Catholic. So it was 17 years later to the exact date that Broc and his teammates won a state title for Canfield.”

Lowry’s football abilities earned him a scholarship at Indiana, where he enrolled early, joining the Hoosiers in January 2023. A year later, the coaching staff that had recruited and signed Lowry was gone, and Curt Cignetti had arrived in Bloomington. 

Lowry wasn’t in the plans for Cignetti and Co. He had friends at IU and wanted to stay and stick it out. His natural inclination was not to look elsewhere, but to try to run headfirst into this next challenge. 

He stuck through the 2024 spring, then realized what his parents had told him during the winter: He’d need to transfer. 

“It was a pretty easy decision to leave,” Lowry said about it at that point, after the lack of reps he got in the spring and the exodus taking place. “But, I made a lot of good friends there. It was kind of easier 'cause a lot of them were also getting told to leave and stuff like that.”

A move to Western Michigan ended up as the natural choice as Lowry followed offensive coordinator Walt Bell, who had recruited him to Indiana, and wide receivers coach Kyle Perkins. He didn’t know much about the place, but took a leap of faith that has ultimately paid dividends. 

A redshirt freshman in 2024, Lowry played in a running quarterback package for the Broncos, spelling established starter Hayden Wolff for a few plays at a time or goal line and short yardage sets. 

With Wolff’s graduation, Lowry was next in line in that iteration of the quarterback room. But the coaching staff opted to bring in some competition in the form of Jones, a transfer from Riverside City College, ahead of the 2025 season. Lowry was largely unproven as a passer, and Jones brought that acumen in spades from his prior stop. 

The duo battled through the offseason and into fall camp, with Taylor praising how Lowry had evolved as a passer and operator of the whole offense. He expressed confidence in the redshirt sophomore early in training camp, even as Lowry himself felt he was slipping behind and Jones took the first team reps. 

After the first scrimmage of fall camp, a few weeks prior to the season opener at Michigan State, Lowry knew he’d fallen behind a step. He hadn’t played well in that period and Jones had eked ahead in their competition to start. 

He knew he needed to do something, anything to set himself apart from Jones in the eyes of the coaches. 

Lowry went to the coaches ahead of the second scrimmage with a basic request: Let me go live. 

“At that time in my mind it was do or die,” Lowry said. “You know, I gotta perform, or you're not gonna win the job. So the only way I could perform my best is being live and being able to run around, too. I was sick and tired of the refs blowing the whistle when the guys got like a fingertip on me.”

It was a last-minute gambit by Lowry to show the coaches his commitment to doing whatever it would take to win. That he subsequently did take some shots in the scrimmage — Lowry recalls safety Joey Pope got him good on at least one play — only leant credibility to his case to be the leader on the field for WMU. 

“When he came to me and wanted to go live in our scrimmages and how he performed in that scrimmage — he was not trying to run around anybody, make anybody miss,” Taylor said. “He was trying to run through our defenders. And that just really impressed me.”

But the battle didn’t get settled in practice, as Taylor opted to let it roll on into the season. Jones started the first three games of the season, as Lowry spelled him. He played significantly in a near-win against North Texas in Week 2 and started to make some inroads in the second half of a blowout road loss to Illinois the following week. 

It set the table for a Toledo game where Lowry found out during the week that he’d start. 

And cometh the hour, cometh the quarterback for Western Michigan this season. 

A season on the brink pulled back by Lowry’s efforts in a comeback, as his completion to Williams on what Taylor called “4th and season” is the exact moment this year turned for Western Michigan. 

In that win and the eight games that followed, Lowry has excelled as a rusher and evolved as a passer. Western Michigan ripped off a 7-1 record in conference, beat its archrival and Lowry himself is the first WMU quarterback to rush for 13 or more touchdowns in more than a century. 

All season, he’s been a willing runner and a rugged one, at that. Lowry will run between the tackles, in short yardage and initiates contact as much as the defenders trying to bring him down. He’s fast enough to run away from linebackers, but he really relishes running guys over. 

And he does this all while maintaining the relaxed, casual demeanor on display as he talks about his last two months. 

“I'm not trying to be screaming at everybody and make me seem like a guy I'm not,” Lowry said. “But you know, I'm just trying to be myself every game. But the offense needs a little kick? I'll give 'em the kick. If they need a little bit more energy, I'll — I gotta adapt.”

Because for as much as he’s a relentless player on the field, the kind of guy who will ask to go live during a fall scrimmage, Lowry is the sort of laid back, amiable presence that entices teammates to come throw a football around on a Thursday at 9 p.m. 

He’s wired to be a quarterback. 

“His poise, he’s calm, cool and collected in any situation and especially when the moments are the biggest. And our other players feed off that,” Taylor said.

For his efforts in 2025, Lowry earned MAC offensive player of the year honors ahead of the Broncos’ title game appearance against Miami (OH), the lone team to defeat WMU since Lowry took the reins.

He won it for his production, naturally, but for anyone watching the Broncos closely, it’s also evident few players in the MAC meant more to their offense, and team, than Lowry. He didn't just do well, but pushed this team to win, week in and week out.

"He could not score any touchdowns in three games in a row, as long as they won, he would not care," Michele said. "He wants everybody to do good. He was always like this. He's very selfless with that, and humble about that kind of stuff. He doesn't really like to be — he never really liked to be the center of attention." 

Lowry has made himself the center of attention to an extent now, though, by being every bit the quarterback Western Michigan needed this season, and by playing the only way he knows how. 

“Don't know how many college recruiters came by, saw him play and just said, 'That's a throwback. That kid's a throwback,'” Pavlansky said. “And he certainly is.”