mvfcfan wrote:The private schools in the MVC are awful. (I'll exclude Valpo since they have actually done something in the past 10 years). I love how a Bradley fan is making fun of our football, even though our football conference is ranked #1 and ranked higher than 3 other FBS conferences. We have teams that beat FBS teams every year. But yeah our "JV" programs are really holding us back, you know since Bradley, Drake, Evansville, and Loyola all sucked and none of them even made it to Saturday. It's kind of odd how all of the "JV football" schools out perform the privates every year in basketball.
I'll add that I will stick up for Drake and Valpo since they actually have football teams, but in reality if anyone is JV in football it's those two schools. The Pioneer League is usually the worst league in FCS, although the SWAC has been giving them some competition lately. Bradley, Loyola, and Evansville are all Horizon League quality in my opinion.
Bradley is bad but it's a historical abnormality-- we have more all time wins than any other team by far. Loyola has only been in the conference 4 years and is projected by many to win next year. Valpo is coming from the Horizon where they were on top of a league of publics (and Detroit). Creighton obviously won a lot of titles here (argue whether they "dominated" or how they landed McDermott but it wasn't just a few years). Drake is, well, Drake, but they made a splash hire with the SoCon coach of the year.
You can't say the MAC is awful in one breath and then basically tout a win over Eastern Michigan (the worst MAC program BTW) in the next. Either the MAC sucks and wins against them don't matter or they do.
The MAC has some real dead weight at the bottom, and it's been like that for years. Probably because if you go to a bad MAC program not only are you going to lose to the good ones but you have to get your head beat in at multiple Power 5 stadiums in order to pay for all the extra expenses in your athletic department. But the MVFC has no team that stacks up with the top, whether it be Western Michigan this year (beat two B1G teams in one year, a few years after NIU did the same... I think ISU Red beat a B1G team for the first time in 100 years of football IIRC). NIU gave Garoppolo-led #1 EIU its only regular season loss a few years ago. FCS Champion James Madison this year lost 56-28 to North Carolina, but they won some games by 70+ points so maybe Sagarin was impressed by that.
Even if Sagarin is right and the MVFC was better than the MAC you're just saying the best JV league is better than the worst Varsity league. Is the best D2 conference better than the SWAC in basketball? I don't know. But even if so it's not like it's that impressive.