Rocco Szczepanski here, reporting from a garage on the north side of Toledo with a socket wrench in one hand and a pierogi in the other. I'm a Jeep-town kid, so I grade every offense in horsepower. A sputtering offense is a lawnmower. A good one is a V-6. And a great one, folks, is 400 horsepower of four-wheel-drive fun.
Saturday in Ypsilanti, the Rockets had the engine running hot.
Part 1: Full Throttle at The Factory
Toledo beat Eastern Michigan 34-14 on Saturday at Rynearson Stadium. We're 5-2 and 2-1 in the MAC.
The offense started the engine early. John Alan Richter threw a 28-yard touchdown pass to Adjatay Dabbs midway through the first quarter. Reice Griffith kicked a 30-yard field goal. CJ Miller scored from a yard out. Autavius Ison ran it in from 13 yards. Miller scored again from 3. It was 31-7 at halftime. That's a V-8 with a fresh tune-up.
Richter went 24 of 30 for 288 yards and a touchdown, an 80% completion rate. Ison ran 18 times for 104 yards, with a long of 42. Bryson Hammer caught five passes for 69 yards, Dabbs caught five for 66, and Cooper Rusk had a 45-yard catch. We piled up 480 yards.
And the defense was a monster truck. AP says the Rockets had six sacks and nine tackles for loss, and stopped Eastern on downs four times. Eastern ran for 34 yards on 28 carries. Andrew Zock had two sacks and, per ESPN's box score, nine quarterback hurries. Nine! Ezra Odinjor had two sacks. Julian Fox made 11 tackles, and Isaac Zay had 2.5 tackles for loss.
Now the honest inspection sticker: we were flagged 14 times for 118 yards. That's a check-engine light, and we have to fix it this week.
Horsepower rating for Saturday: 400. Four-wheel drive engaged.
Let me walk you through the whole season's service record, because this engine's been running for a while. We lost 30-20 at Michigan State in the opener, which is no shame. Then we beat Central Connecticut 63-10, outlasted Temple 49-48 and beat San Diego State 41-16, all at home. We won 39-24 at Ball State. We hit a pothole against Buffalo. And now we're back on the highway after Saturday. The offense has scored 34 or more five times. That's a motor that turns over every morning, even in a Toledo winter.
Part 2: The Broncos Come to the Glass Bowl
Saturday, noon Eastern, CBS Sports Network, Western Michigan at Toledo.
I'll be a gentleman about it. Western Michigan is 5-2 and 3-0 in the MAC. It lost 13-12 at Michigan in its opener. Its defense is good: AP ranks it 25th in FBS in scoring defense, at 16.9 points a game, and 17th in red zone defense. Jalen Buckley ran for 150 yards against Central Michigan. Justyce Betts has 51 tackles. Western is disciplined and takes care of the ball. That's a well-maintained vehicle.
But let's pop the hood on that offense, using AP's preview.
Western Michigan's passing offense ranks 129th in FBS, at 157.6 yards a game. Its offense overall ranks 121st in yards. Its scoring offense ranks 90th. Against Central Michigan, Broc Lowry threw eight passes for 48 yards. Forty-eight yards! That's a riding lawnmower. With a bag on the back.
Meanwhile, Toledo's offense ranks 20th in FBS in yards, 27th passing and 28th in scoring, at 36.3 points a game. Richter has 14 touchdown passes and one interception. Dabbs has 468 receiving yards and five touchdowns. Miller has 426 rushing yards and six touchdowns. And Zock has seven sacks on the season.
So here's the math, Jeep-plant style: Western has to run the ball to move. Our run defense ranks 46th in FBS. If we make Western throw, we're putting a lawnmower on the freeway.
The Broncos also got a little help from the schedule. They lost 32-7 at home to Boise State, a different set of Broncos entirely. Even the Broncos couldn't handle the Broncos.
I'll admit two things. One, Buffalo beat us 23-8 at the Glass Bowl on Oct. 10, and that was a flat tire. Two, Western beat us 14-13 last season, according to CollegeFootballData.com. But Toledo leads the series 39-24. We won 49-31 in 2023 and 34-15 in 2021, both at the Glass Bowl. This is our garage.
And a little Rockets history for the road. Wikipedia says Toledo played its first few years without a nickname, until two long touchdown runs in a 1923 game against Carnegie Tech got the team dubbed the "Rockets." We lost that game. But we came out of it with the best nickname in the conference. That's how Toledo works: even on a bad day, we build something. Wikipedia also lists Toledo with a 12-11 record in bowl games. We've been to the postseason plenty, and we'd like to go again.
Tales From Two Towns
Toledo. Toledo is a city of 270,871 at the western end of Lake Erie, on the Maumee River, per Wikipedia. We're "The Glass City," because glass makers started arriving in the 1880s, and the Toledo Museum of Art has a large glass collection to prove it. Jeep has its headquarters here, with two production plants called the Toledo Complex, and Wikipedia says Toledo's industries built the Willys Jeep for the military in World War II. And our stadium is the Glass Bowl, a Works Progress Administration project finished in 1937 that got its glass touches after the war and its name in 1946. You want horsepower, glass and grit? This is the place. The same New Deal era brought the Toledo Zoo its amphitheater and aquarium, per Wikipedia, and the Toledo Museum of Art got a major expansion. Toledo was building in the 1930s while other towns were waiting.
And a little history for our friends from up north. Wikipedia says Ohio and the Michigan Territory fought the nearly bloodless Toledo War in the 1830s over the strip of land that includes Toledo. Michigan lost. We've been in Ohio ever since. Some folks call it a border dispute. I call it Michigan's first loss in Toledo.
Kalamazoo. Kalamazoo is a nice city of 73,598, and I'll admit the name is fun. Wikipedia says it's become a byword for faraway places, as in "from Timbuktu to Kalamazoo." That's right: Kalamazoo is the place people name when they mean somewhere far away and exotic. Folks, it's in the very next state, right up the road from us. I've driven there in a Wrangler, and I didn't even need four-wheel drive. And its big civic achievement is the Kalamazoo Mall, the first outdoor pedestrian shopping mall in the country, which was built by closing part of Burdick Street to cars. Toledo builds Jeeps. Kalamazoo closed a street so nobody could drive on it. I don't think I need to explain which town has more horsepower.
Rocco's Pre-Drive Checklist
1. Fix the check-engine light. Fourteen flags won't fly against a team this disciplined. 2. Make Western throw. A lawnmower can't win a drag race. 3. Keep Richter clean. One interception all year. Keep it that way.
That's 400 horsepower of run game. Go Rockets.
My call: Toledo Rockets 26, Western Michigan Broncos 22.