Re: College Sports Madness Top 144
Posted: August 3rd, 2017, 3:52 am
Looking at these rankings I feel as though the Valley has been vastly underrated and unfairly punished for Wichita State's departure. Everyone is in such a rush to write the epitaph for this conference, constantly talking about how down the Valley is, how low the conference has sunk, and how this league is going to join the ranks of the other perennial one-bid leagues. Sure the league is down now but by no stretch of the imagination is it out. Look at the WCC. No one's writing their obituary and they're going to have as many teams in these rankings (4) as the MVC. The difference between them and us is simply that they haven't been plundered yet and they got a huge gift when BYU took its football team independent and joined up. How down can a conference truly be when a rival mid major conference needs two realignment gifts (Gonzaga being too far away from other conferences to jump and BYU going FBS independent and joining) to even stay near the MVC while the MVC has been the unfortunate victim of the past two realignments.(Creighton becoming a major geographical outlier in the Big East, and the AAC choosing to add Wichita State when they could have easily added VCU instead). The Valley is down but it's surely not out, and it is great to see teams like UNI and Illinois State realizing this and going for it. I just hope the overwhelming majority of the other schools follow suit. The time is now as we stand at the crossroads and the decisions made by the Valley schools in these next few critical years will determine its destiny.