Eastern Michigan Eagles vs. Central Michigan Chippewas Football Final: Chippewas Are Finally Bowl-Eligible, Wins 38-7

Rivalry games are meant to be intense. They bring fan bases together, forcing people, who absolutely hate each others' guts, into the same stadium and all of their arguments and fights are settled by a football game. The Eastern Michigan vs. Central Michigan game in Mt. Pleasant back in 2011 was one of my favorite games I've ever attended. I hated everybody and chewed off all of the nails I had on my fingers. It was so close, so competitive, so hard-hitting, teetering back and forth where every snap was much more important than the last.

This has to be one of the most dull rivalry games this conference has ever seen. That's probably just my intuition speaking, but no matter who you rooted for in this game, it was just really really boring.

Who needs Thomas Rawls?

The Eagles just could not stop the run. They came out flat and never figured out a good way to respond to CMU's run game. Thomas Rawls was out after suffering an injury against Buffalo last week. He was the listed starter, but even Devon Spalding, the third or fourth stringer (after the second string, it's all the same anyways) ended up being CMU's leading rusher with 158 yards with two touchdowns. Saylor Lavallii, who started the game and had a 41-yard rushing touchdown on their first drive, picked up 109 on the ground on 24 touches with a pair of score of his own.

As a team, the Chippewas had 309 rushing yards. EMU had 21.

Cooper Rush threw with precision

18-for-23 for 223 and a touchdown (interception too, but EMU didn't do anything with the ball after that happened): not much more you can ask from Cooper Rush. Deon Butler led CMU in receiving with five catches for nearly 100 yards. Titus Davis and Anthony Rice both had four catches a piece for 51 and 24 yards, respectively. Davis was the only one with a touchdown.

Darius Jackson was the only one who had a receiving score for the Eagles, but it came so late in the fourth quarter that is was what everybody would call "garbage time".

Eastern Michigan came out flat

Countless three-and-outs (okay, we could count 'em, but I'm currently drinking a Bell's Two-Hearted and I'm not about to go back and count the actual total), bad punts, no one player dominated for the Green and White, CMU always seemed to do everything better on nearly every play. There's no way to really measure this outside of seeing the final score and the fact that EMU only had 76 total offensive yards and five first downs. They also played really, really badly.

That, and they averaged 1.9 yards per play.

Next Games

EMU is off until the 15th when they head to Kalamazoo and face off against Western Michigan. The Chippewas will go back home to Mt. Pleasant and face off against the Miami RedHawks. The Central/Western game isn't until November 22.