Late last week, the Mid-American Conference (MAC) set a new conference softball schedule and established minimum requirements for postseason qualification.
An email outlining the new changes was distributed to conference coaches last week. JWOS viewed a copy of the correspondence over the weekend.
MAC teams will move to a 40-game conference schedule for the 2021 season, and coaches are being asked to prepare a recommendation on a format that contains 4-game conference series’. The 11-member league traditionally plays 3-game series’ and a total of twenty-one conference games in a season.
Coaches that spoke to JWOS on the condition of anonymity expressed split opinions on whether the new format will lead to two doubleheaders each weekend, or if the league will adopt a 1-2-1 game format and still play across Friday, Saturday, and Sunday each week. According to sources, both options remain possibilities at this point in time.
In addition to the conference scheduling changes, teams were left with the option of playing non-conference games, up to the NCAA limit of 56 total games in a season.
The MAC also set a minimum game threshold that a team must reach to receive the league’s automatic qualifying bid to the NCAA tournament. In order to qualify as the conference champions, a team must complete at least 85% of the average number of conference games played during the regular season. By way of an example, if the conference averaged thirty games played per team, a program would have to play at least 26 games to qualify as league champions.
