There are no guarantees in life, but if the Mike Jacobs era at Toledo is not successful, it would likely be a mystery that demands a Congressional hearing.
For starters, every Toledo coach dating back to 1963 has won at least one MAC conference or division championship. Eight of the last nine full-time Toledo head coaches left the school with winning records. Group of 6 programs cringe when you bring this up, but four of the last five left for other FBS jobs.
And then there's Jacobs, who brings with him a 94-23 across 10 seasons at three universities. His teams have won their conference or division more times (seven) than not (three). Jacobs took Notre Dame College and Lenoir-Rhyne to the Division II semifinals and Mercer to the FCS quarters. His career .803 winning percentage trails only Ryan Day, Kalen DeBoer and Kirby Smart, and comes in ahead of Curt Cignetti and Dabo Swinney. Oh, and he's a Toledo native.
"We've proven over the past three stops that we can build a roster in different reasons of the country with different types of players," Jacobs told FootballScoop via phone on Tuesday. "We can assimilate to what their skill set is, and we've won everywhere we've been through commitment to the basics. The goal is not to reinvent the wheel but push it from good to great, and we can do that through high-level recruiting in the 6-hour radius around the University of Toledo."
To be clear, Jacobs believes in his own and his staff's ability to win football games, but he also won because he took good jobs.
"There were a handful of suitors we turned down because we felt strongly about the situation we had at Mercer," Jacobs said. "They were highly committed at the administrative level. When the Toledo job came open for the first time in a decade, it was a couple things, not just the fact that it was my hometown. I believe the all-time winning percentage is in the low 60s, so that means everyone who has been here has had a high level of success. We've averaged eight wins per season over the last decade. And so you know there's the infrastructure, there's community support which is unmatched in this conference, and then there's the financial commitment to be highly competitive in the Group of 6."
Though he played at Ohio State and GA'd at Eastern Michigan and Purdue, Jacobs coached at the Division II level from 2008 through 2023. He didn't know it at the time, but those 17 seasons learning the ins and outs of Division II football would one day become arguably the most valuable skill set for an FBS head coach in 2026.
"I'll argue until my face turns blue that the Division II level -- the ability to divide the 36 equivalencies at that level has set me up more for this moment than anything else I've done in my career because I've been doing it the last 13 years. It wasn't called rev-share, but it was," he said. "From a scholarship standpoint, you have to identify talent, you've got to identify needs for your program, and then you have to place a dollar value on what your needs are. It could be different from year to year and position to position."
It's not an accident that the reigning national champion cut his teeth as a head coach in Division II.
"You learn every step of the process. You learn the administrative process, you learn how to manage academics without an academic support staff. There's nothing you haven't had to do or accommodate to the resources you have," Jacobs said.
Toledo has added 51 new players to a team that, in theory, went 8-5 last season and tied for second in the MAC. (The Rockets beat runner-up Miami of Ohio but lost out on tiebreakers to the RedHawks.) That's an enormous number, but not that enormous in an age where others are shipping in 70-plus new players. "I think you spend whatever time you can spend not talking about football. Meals together, bowling, paintball," he said. "I think just being open and honest with them, allowing them to see that I'm a family man, having the coaches' families around and getting a sense of who we are, I think it's a first step in gaining their trust. And then you have to hold them accountable."
Western Michigan's undefeated 2016 squad rose as high as No. 15 in the CFP rankings and reached the Cotton Bowl, but to date that's the last MAC team to appear in the selection committee's top 25. (Toledo was briefly ranked in 2015.) It's the longest CFP/New Year's Six drought in the Group of 6. Obviously, Jacobs was hired in part to change that.
"The MAC is a tremendous football conference," he said. "There's tremendous coaches and players in talent, that's why it continues to get raided in the P4 every year in the portal. You have to consistently schedule competitive games against the Power 4, which is becoming harder to do, and you have to not only play well, but you've got to win some of those. Those are statement games that people immediately remember. But then the back half of that is, you have to handle business in your conference as well."
The Rockets open with Michigan State in what will also be the first game under new head coach Pat Fitzgerald, and then get crucial home games with Temple out of the American and perennial Mountain West (now Pac-12) contender San Diego State. The last two MAC champions, Western Michigan and Ohio, also come to the Glass Bowl. Jacobs did not offer any big proclamations for what the 2026 Rockets will accomplish, allowing his track record to speak for itself while pointing toward a goal with deeper meaning than wins or losses.
"We're going to try to create a culture where we make it really, really hard for them to leave because they feel so strongly tied to what we're doing."