“They killed us,” Central Michigan head coach Jim McElwain said when quizzed about last year’s contest against South Alabama. It was an emphatic and definitive statement, rooted in fact thanks to the box score from the last time these two programs met in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan 378 days prior.
The contest was the second game of the season for a CMU team expected to make a run at the MAC West division title once again in 2022 after getting left out of the championship game due to a tiebreaker. The Chips were five-point favorites going into last year’s game, but came out a wounded mess, scratched by the Jaguars for a 31-10 halftime lead which ultimately stretched into a 38-24 final for the road team.