I asked his thoughts on expanding the current four-team system. Steinbrecher’s conference has yet to have a team get anywhere near the Playoff, as was also the case for the BCS title game, though Western Michigan and Northern Illinois have made a couple top-tier bowls recently. And in basketball, Buffalo blew out Pac-12 champion Arizona in the NCAA tournament. In football, the year marked its 10th time to have five or more programs receive a bowl bid, and its Power 5 games included wins over Nebraska, Rutgers, Kansas, and Kansas again.

Let’s not undervalue or overvalue a team because of some artificial label.” The MAC had a pretty successful 2017-18. “It’s also pushing back on this idea that we’ve taken what was intended as some governance designation - autonomous FBS conferences and non-autonomous conferences,” Steinbrecher said, of the NCAA’s differing legislative designations for conferences within Division I, “and the public and the media and others have slapped qualitative definitions to them that were never intended,” as in: BCS-style, power-conference status. And I imagine we’ll have some fun on social media.” We’ve seen non-power conferences come up with slogans and such before - the AAC’s “Power 6” initiative is meant to associate that league with the perennial powers - and this pirate flag is the MAC’s way of standing up for itself amid revenue sports that tend to favor the bigger leagues. But certainly at home, I hope our schools have some fun coming up with some sort of tradition around this. You do this at your home stadium, and then when you get home from a road trip you ring it up.

“Now I don’t expect somebody when they go on the road to be ringing a flag up somebody’s flagpole, obviously. “I have provided a flag for each institution,” Steinbrecher said. “We’ve had that - kind of quiet, internally - and I thought this would be a great way to continue and continue to build something the entire conference, all of our membership, can rally around.” As far as the actual plans for flying the flag, don’t expect this bad boy to be making any road trips outside the MAC’s footprint anytime soon. And it was a good visual picture for me,” he said with a laugh. “And we may not have the biggest ships or stadiums, but we’re manned by well-motivated captains, which are our coaches, and the crews, which are our student-athletes, and chips on our shoulder to go out there and prove ourselves. And just said, we don’t always get a lot of respect, and what respect we get, we often have to go out and take.

And so I characterized us as the pirates of initially the BCS, now the CFP and the FBS. “And the lack of respect that non-autonomous often get. “Pushing back on the labels that are slapped on us,” Steinbrecher said. And it was just a fun way to rally the troops.” So, what do pirates have to do with MAC football? “And every time they’d get a win, we put a pirate flag in each of those spots, and then I would email out our pirate flag with just a little congratulatory note saying fly the flag. “For four years now, we’ve put together kind of a little tote board in our office that lists all of our teams’ non-conference games and the bowl opportunities,” Steinbrecher told SB Nation. Are you ready to #FlyTheFlag!? #MACtion /jrOGVFdyd0- #MACtion July 25, 2018

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