Central Michigan carried the ball 25 times at Miami and gained 21 yards. Angel Flores, the starting quarterback, did not come back out after halftime, and Matt Drinkall handed the rest of the 52-3 loss to Jadyn Glasser, with Marcus Beamon taking a series. Caden VanHuis's 49-yard field goal was the entire Chippewa scoring night. Two weeks earlier CMU had run for 339 yards against Wyoming, with Flores going for 163 and two touchdowns and Brock Townsend breaking a 38-yard score. Against Miami's front, that same attack went nowhere.
The strange part is what the passing numbers did. CMU's three quarterbacks combined to complete 21 of 26 throws, about 81 percent and reportedly the third-best single-game completion rate in program history, and it produced 137 yards, one interception and no touchdowns. Glasser took the most extensive work, 13-of-15 for 88 yards, against Flores' 5-of-7 for 20. Drinkall and Flores spent camp describing a 2026 offense that would be faster, more diversified and more open through the air than the ball-control version that carried the 2025 team. What showed up at Miami was completions without yards, short and safe, in a game already gone. That is not the evolution anyone described in August.
So the interesting thing about Akron, at 3:30 p.m. ET Saturday at Kelly/Shorts on ESPN+, is not the outcome. CMU wins that game 91 percent of the time in the model. It is whether the ground game comes back and who is standing behind center when it does.
What Saturday actually shows
CMU ran the ball on two-thirds of its snaps in 2025, fifth-most in FBS, and averaged 32 minutes of possession a game. That is the identity that produced Drinkall's 7-6 2025 record, 5-3 in the MAC and the program's first bowl trip since 2021 after three straight losing years. He kept his coordinators, Jim Chapin on offense and quarterbacks, Sean Cronin on defense, so nothing about the plan was supposed to change underneath him. MAC coaches picked CMU fifth in the preseason poll; the national publications landed somewhere between third and sixth. That is the band the Chippewas are trying to climb out of, and at 2-2 with the nonconference slate closed, the climb starts now.
Akron's front is not Miami's. If Flores and the backs move the ball on the ground Saturday and Flores plays the whole game, the Miami film reads as one superior opponent doing what superior opponents do.
Watch the defense too. It gave up 52 points, 572 yards, one sack and no takeaways at Miami. Jaion Jackson is the thread worth following there. The captain cornerback sat out the first half against Colgate on Drinkall's own call, then played the second and drew a direct compliment from his head coach for the difference he made.
None of this resolves this week. But a run game that reappears against Akron makes the next month look very different than one that does not.
Elsewhere Saturday
Toledo at Ball State: root for Ball State
The model gives Ball State a 6% chance to win. Ball State is a long shot here.
Toledo is the MAC team CMU's title-game math actually runs through, and Ball State knocking off a conference contender at home takes a game off Toledo's ledger in the standings CMU shares. The problem is that Ball State pulls it off only about 6 percent of the time. Worth a glance, not a plan. With a Ball State win CMU's title-game odds sit at 10.0 percent, and with a Toledo win they sit at 7.3 percent, a difference of 2.7 points either way.
Full numbers are in the interactive guide, and the methodology explains where the simulations come from.