BOWLING GREEN — Bowling Green State University football coach Scot Loeffler isn’t expecting a letdown from his team this week.
Even after arguably the toughest loss of his tenure with the Falcons.
Two days after BGSU’s heartbreaking 32-31 defeat to rival Toledo in which the Rockets scored the game-winning touchdown on a fourth-down play with less than two minutes left, Loeffler was upbeat during his weekly press conference Thursday. The fifth-year Falcons’ coach mentioned how proud he was of his team, how the Battle of I-75 is “a game now,” and how the chance at securing a winning season at Western Michigan on Tuesday will be a motivating factor.
“I don’t see us acting any different,” Loeffler said. “We’ve got the opportunity to have the first winning record here since 2015. We’ve got a chance to win eight ball games with the toughest schedule in the MAC.
“We’re a good football team. We’ve found who we are, and I think our program just keeps on getting better, and that’s what I want. That’s what our whole goal is.”
BGSU (6-5, 4-3 Mid-American Conference) did about everything right but come out on top against one of the best Toledo teams in program history.
BGSU’s one-point loss to Toledo is the Falcons’ smallest margin of defeat during the Loeffler era. With the exception of four ties, only six of the other 80-plus BGSU-Toledo matchups were decided by one point; the last came in 1992.
“It’s just the small mistakes that we have to fix, and we’ve just got to take practice day by day and accomplish what we’ve got to do,” BGSU junior defensive lineman Ali Saad said. “... I just feel like after this game, we’ve just got to get back on track, and I feel like from there on, we’re just going to lock in and do what we’ve got to do.”
The past two BGSU-Toledo games have come down to the wire after the Rockets claimed 11 of the previous 12. The Falcons won 42-35 in 2022 on a 42-yard touchdown reception by Ta’ron Keith with nine seconds left.
“I’m excited about the rivalry game now, because it’s a game. It is a game now,” Loeffler said. “When we first started here, we were terrible and just found a way to win [in 2019], and then we got our tails beat in by them two years in a row because we still weren’t ready to play.
“And now, it’s a game, in my opinion. I think they would probably feel the same. That game should be that way and look that way and taste that way, and hopefully, we come out on top more than they do.”
BGSU junior tight end Levi Gazarek, who grew up 20 minutes down the road from Bowling Green in North Baltimore, said the competitive matchups recently have shown how much the Falcons’ program has grown.
“I think it’s safe to say the rivalry’s back. It’s safe to say that,” Gazarek said. “I watched this game every year growing up. This is where I’m from, I’ve watched it every year. There was really no rivalry in the 2010s, they dominated it.
“... But that’s what a rivalry’s going to be. It’s going to be, who gets that last drive. It’s going to come down to four or five plays, and you want to come out on the right side of those four or five plays. You never know which play it’s going to be, and that’s why every play you’ve got to give 100 percent. You never know what’s going to happen.”
A win over Western Michigan (4-7, 3-4 MAC) in the regular-season finale would give BGSU seven wins for the first time since going 10-4 in 2015.
The Falcons’ 2022 record of 6-7, which included a five-point loss to New Mexico State in the Quick Lane Bowl, was a step forward for the program, and two more wins in a challenging 2023 campaign to close out the season would be an even bigger step.
“I think over the last five weeks, our football team is playing as well as anyone in our conference,” Loeffler said. “I think we really started becoming consistent, playing good football, finding ways to play good ball with some key players out, and that’s what good teams do.”
First Published November 16, 2023, 10:08 p.m.
