MVC targeting Valpo & Murray State to create 11 team league

[ValpoTX]

If you want to get technical, NW Indiana has around 800,000 people in Lake, Porter, LaPorte, Newton, and Jasper counties. This is the second largest metropolitan area in IN, outside of Indianapolis.

What is laughable is how cocky NDSU fans appear to be. When you have a run of success in basketball similar to what we/Murray State have, then you can talk. In football, you can talk all you want, as your program is king of FCS, but this isn't football.

[Pathfinder]

I can't believe how many of you dudes are like, "well, convinced me," or "PantherU makes good points."

As I understand it, Panther's argument is this:

Anyone who is close to the Milwaukee program (unless they're naive) knows that the athletic director sabotaged the team during the final years of the Rob Jeter era in order to fire Rob Jeter. That happened a year ago. Her job is tied to the success of the new coach, LaVall Jordan, who has 100% support from the community and fan base. She would be absolutely nuts to do anything but try her hardest to support the basketball program now.

The APR ban was due to mishandled paperwork by a former compliance officer who left in 2013. He failed to file paperwork on several players who had been playing pro ball and would be exempt from the APR score (including Chiefs TE Demetrius Harris, who has since gotten his degree). He also failed to file paperwork on subsequent appeals, and was the only employee in athletics to be aware of it (as he was both the only person in compliance and the administrator overseeing academics in MBB). He left in summer 2013. Since they discovered the problem, the basketball team has put up a perfect 1000 APR score. Academics are not an issue.

So, the MVC should take Milwaukee because--if we take PantherU at his word, though it sounds a bit preposterous to me--they've have an AD who is willing to "sabotage" the program for several years just so she can fire the coach, and because the only reason the NCAA put them on academic probation is that they hire incompetent compliance officers ? That's an argument for taking Milwaukee? How many other schools have been put on probation in the last 5 years because of their APR? And the AD tried to sabotage the program for three years? Yeah, right--any woman in her first job as an AD would intentionally try to sabotage her school's most prominent sports program. What better way to assure your own personal successs, right? The idea of firing him right away because of the team's 8-24 record the prior year? Apparently never occurred to her.

That bizarre accusation might make us consider the course. Is this the same PantherU mentioned here: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2396&p=43738&hilit=PantherU#p43736

@PantherU on twitter:

Not able to confirm this 100%, but it looks like Belmont, Oakland and Evansville will be joining the Horizon League. I'm not hearing any other schools brought up by my contacts, and too many contacts are using those three together. Either everyone I talk to is conferring with each other, or where there's smoke there's fire. I'm thinking the latter.

Panther also assures us:

In a survey a couple years ago, students and fans overwhelmingly cited "low level opponents" such as Youngstown State as why they wouldn't go to games. Moving to the MVC would eliminate that in a heartbeat. I'd be willing to bet we'd be in Top 3 in attendance by Year 3 in the MVC.

So attendance will get better with that MVC invite? Well, couldn't you say that about any team moving up to the MVC from the Horizon, then? My guess is that fans at other Horizon schools aren't flocking down to see Milwaukee. And you know what Milwaukee's average attendance was last year? 1560. 9th in the 10 team Horizon. The year before, even though they won 20 games, it was 2667, below the Horizon average and in the bottom half of the conference.

But don't worry:

For big opponents, Milwaukee has always come out - this has included conference games like Valpo and Green Bay

Yeah--a whopping 2267 for Valpo this year, and 2626 for their arch rival, Green Bay.

But there's an excuse. In the other thread, though, he argues:

I have heard a few people bring up that Milwaukee's attendance is an issue, so I want to address that and end any worry about it right here, right now.

Several months before the 2015-16 season, our Director of Ticket Sales, Brian Morgan, left to go to Marquette. We were left with our assistant ticket manager, Eric Becker. He was running the office until August, when he took a similar job at Pitt.

The reason Morgan has not been replaced yet is because the athletic department is currently in a reshuffling to prepare for growth as a program. In short, they're currently trying to model the program after elite mid-majors and the spot just hasn't been filled yet.

So if you're wondering how attendance was bad this year, just know that Milwaukee Basketball was having tickets sold by student workers. That won't be the case moving forward.

In other words, "we've had terrible management, but trust me (a fan with a website), we'll get better." OK.

And of course, there's always the fact, as Panther points out, that their new coach wasn't hired by another school. That's convincing, eh?

Now, he's right on two things: they've got a big arena and they get you into the Milwaukee market. Oh, and he's right, in a series that began 7 years ago, they went 2-2 against UNI teams that never made the tournament. Well, sign me up!

Meanwhile, in another threat viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4692&p=105754#p105754, Panther argues that Milwaukee deserves a bid because they lost the Horizon League to Butler in 2010 and 2011. Shiver me timbers!

I'll go with squirrel, who points out:

Until 1999, Milwaukee was among the worst programs in DI. Period.

From 1999 until 2005 Milwaukee was fortunate to have Bo Ryan and Bruce Pearl in succession. Even Ryan in his 2 seasons only managed to get them to 3 over .500 for his two years-a testament to just how horrendous the program was in the nineties. Pearl was able to take a good situation and lead the program to 3 NCAA bids before leaving in 2005. They were probably very fortunate to avoid any sort of NCAA problems stemming from the Pearl era.

Rob Jeter, a Bo Ryan product, took Pearl's program to the tournament in his first year, and then proceeded to finish higher than 4th just twice over the next 10 years, and just 4 times higher than 5th. While he did have a second NCAA appearance, it was as a fifth place finisher.

As for the two seasons you cite, Milwaukee finished 4th in 2010, behind Wright St and Green Bay as well. So they ran into more than just The Greatest Mid-Major of All-Time (which is openly debatable.) I'll give you 2011 since they not only tied Butler for the league title, they also beat them. But they won fewer overall games and didn't even make the tourney because of a schedule that wasn't good enough to get them in...that's a Valley no-no, unless you're the Redbirds, but they'll never get it.

They've had losing Horizon records in 3 of the last 5 years.

Look, its OK to try and sell Milwaukee, they're not at the top of my list, but if we're being honest about history, the program has largely been a trainwreck. Now, they haven't been as terrible as they were in their early DI days, but they have had more teams closer to the bottom of DI than they have RPI 100 teams since Bo Ryan and Bruce Pearl have been out of the picture.

Their performance profile beyond that is the very definition of meh.

In the other thread, Panther again argues:

it's a hell of a lot easier to recruit better players in the MVC. It's a hell of a lot easier to get fans excited about the program in the MVC. It's a hell of a lot easier to build a schedule in the MVC.

Isn't that true of any Horizon program? So if Milwaukee is one of the weaker programs in the HL--weak on attendance, so-so on the court--where's the benefit of taking them over, say, Wright State or Green Bay, which draw better and have been better on the court? Or Northern Kentucky, which won 24 games, made the Tournament, has the best facilities in the Horizon, and would get the MVC a toehold in the Cincinnati market (NKU is in a Cincy suburb).

The case for Milwaukee is no better (and in some cases quite a bit worse) than the case for Wright State, Northern Kentucky, Detroit, Oakland, Cleveland State, Green Bay, Omaha, Denver, Oral Roberts, UIC, or IUPUI.

[Bball Junkie]

Murray State is in a nice area. The Murray area falls within the Paducah, KY media market which is rated #81. The Paducah market is fairly populous because there are many cities included that are outside of Kentucky. Carbondale, Marion, and Harrisburg, IL are included. Cape Girardeau, Sikeston, Poplar Bluff, MO are included. Even northern Tennessee falls within the market. To compare, Fargo is #117. So, not only does Murray St fit the Valley geographically and brings in a natural rival to several existing schools, it also brings in more households to the Valley than would Fargo.

[uniftw]

Sorry, but the disparaging of NDSUs university profile in comparison to Murray State and Valpo is laughable. NDSUs Overall athletic programs would be a huge benefit to the MVC. I can assure you that in conference a conf like the MVC, ndsu would double its basketball budget to 2.5-3 Million within 5 years behind a strong teammaker organization and average 5500 per game. Murray State and Valpo? Really, over ndsu? You must really like your bus league and your incremental thinking. Fargo has a 1/4 million people in the 5 county area, a state following, and has a wide reach into MN. Basketball is a sleeping giant. Valpo and Murray you say? Really, have you been to Valpo and Murray? No comparison to what the FM area offers.

You, and other say, "WE'D DOUBLE OUR BUDGET WITH IN AN INVITE", yet have done nothing to give anyone reason to believe you.

You build a brand new rec facility that houses your basketball team. Great. It'd the the second smallest in the MVC, and it's brand new. For being in such a massive media market, compared to everyone else, you have given no on reason to believe anyone up there gives a damn about basketball. You are playing century old rivals in South Dakota, South Dakota State and North Dakota and averaging just 3,000 (or less) people per game. Suddenly playing Evansville, Bradley and Indiana State is going to bring that to at least 5,500? So you're going to average a sell out every single game? Really? Why should we believe that? What reason has NDSU, and it's fans, given us to believe that. For your 3 biggest rivalry games - SDSU, USD and UND, you averaged under 5,000. On top of that, for every other home game on the schedule you averaged under 3,500 fans per game. Why would Indiana State, Bradley, Drake, Evansville, Loyola, or Missouri State be any different? I imagine UNI/ISUr woud draw well but I can't imagine the others drawing better than IUPUI, IPFW, ORU, Denver, WIU or UNO.

Don't give me "It's difference beause we'd have a football rivalry on top of it. If that's the case why have 2 of the last 3 WIU games in Fargo been 2,200 and 3,100 in attendance. The average over the last 7 years looks to be under 3,000.

Let's pretend it's high because it is football. How are you going to average 5,500 for the season with so many non-football schools (Loyola, Drake, Evansville, Bradley) on your schedule? There's no way you're averaging more than 3,400 for those 4. I'd be shocked if it crossed 3,000

The MVC doesn't take programs that dont' fund themselves and then go "You have 5-8 years to up your spending". The MVC takes programs that have already made that commitment. Loyola hasn't been great on court, but they spend double what the Dakota's do, and their recruiting has been really good. It's a matter of their coach figuring it out.

Murray State has, apparently, made a commitment to go from 2.3m to 3m in basketball spending within a year or two. Valpo is already at 2.7m and I wouldn't be shocked to see that go up.

Murray State played in a real nice 8,600 seat facility. They have a history of NCAA appearances, sending coaches on to P5 jobs, players into the NBA.

Valpo's roster has like 6 or 7 3*, or higher, recruits on it moving forward including a 4* they just picked up yesterday.

Both carry national name recognition in basketball.

NDSU has none of that. People in our conference give UNI crap for being slow, white, unathletic farm boys. UNI's guys would run circles around many of the NDSU players. We watched them do it to SDSU this past season.

[Herd]

If you want to get technical, NW Indiana has around 800,000 people in Lake, Porter, LaPorte, Newton, and Jasper counties. This is the second largest metropolitan area in IN, outside of Indianapolis.

What is laughable is how cocky NDSU fans appear to be. When you have a run of success in basketball similar to what we/Murray State have, then you can talk. In football, you can talk all you want, as your program is king of FCS, but this isn't football.

Cocky? Not at all, just trying to bring some knowledge to all this nieve information. How many of your 800k actually care about Valpo basketball? Ndsu has a state following with a strong reach into MN of people who care about ndsu sports, not as their 2nd or third option. Ndsu has done amazing things in a short time in DI basketball with a handful of top 25 wins. Ndsu would compete very well in the MVC, and the support structure would push them to the top of the league.

[UEACES80]

My bottomline is I am sure NDSU, ND, SDSU and SDU are all capable of competing in the MVC but they are located in the Dakotas and that is simply not a good geographic fit for the MVC. If you were all in the Midwest and not the Upper Great Plains there likely would be a nice fit but you aren't.

Just trying to be logical rather than tearing down any of the Dakota schools it is simply a geographically issue.

[Jsnhbe1Birds]

If you want to get technical, NW Indiana has around 800,000 people in Lake, Porter, LaPorte, Newton, and Jasper counties. This is the second largest metropolitan area in IN, outside of Indianapolis.

What is laughable is how cocky NDSU fans appear to be. When you have a run of success in basketball similar to what we/Murray State have, then you can talk. In football, you can talk all you want, as your program is king of FCS, but this isn't football.

Cocky? Not at all, just trying to bring some knowledge to all this nieve information. How many of your 800k actually care about Valpo basketball? Ndsu has a state following with a strong reach into MN of people who care about ndsu sports, not as their 2nd or third option. Ndsu has done amazing things in a short time in DI basketball with a handful of top 25 wins. Ndsu would compete very well in the MVC, and the support structure would push them to the top of the league.

Valpo has A LOT of grads in Chicago as its only a 40 minutes from downtown of the third biggest city in the whole country.

[mvfcfan]

After a lot of thought my vote for a 12th team goes to SE Missouri State currently. I am going to (hopefully not falsely) assume in this post that Murray State and Valparaiso are in. No one has really mentioned SEMO, but I don't think they would be terrible add. They are definitely better than adding an extension campus team in my opinion.

Their teams aren't very good right now, but they have the potential (like everyone else) to get better. They went 15-18 in basketball (played competitively against Bradley and MO State twice) and 3-8 in football (played competitively against SIU and INST).

Their location is a big reason why I like them. They are very close to SIU and Murray State and already have rivalries with both of those teams in a way. They are also decently close to Missouri State and would sort of give them a potential rival. IMO the 12th team needs to be someone in Missouri State's vicinity to keep them from feeling "left out".

Their basketball arena is not too bad either.



The city they are in is also decently sized (38K). No it's not a huge city, but it's not tiny either. The city actually owns the Show Me Center (where they play basketball). The fact that the city owns it is not an issue with me either. Bradley's arena for example is owned by Peoria. I feel like I need to clarify that before someone "smart" thinks that's an awful thing.

I like the fact that they also have a D1 scholarship football team. It really makes football a lot more stable for the MVC schools that play football (6 of them including Murray St). If the Summit League schools left the MVFC it would leave us at the minimum 8 teams for football. I'm going to assume 9, because I really doubt WIU would go along with the Dakota's. I already mentioned in another post that I think they are probably going to end up in the Horizon League with IUPUI and IPFW. That would give the HL 12 teams assuming we don't take Milwaukee.

Their attendance isn't anything spectacular. They did get 5225 people in attendance for the Murray State game though, which SEMO won 82-69. For a comparison when SEMO played at Murray State, MuSu got 3080 people to show up. SEMO also won that game 75-74. Most of the time their (SEMO) attendance seems to be closer to the 1500 range. In all seriousness though, Milwaukee was drawing about 1500 for most of their home games last year too and they are in a city where most people either care about Wisconsin or Marquette (aka they are a third choice). In Cape Girardeau I'd say SEMO is probably second behind Missouri, but at least they are not right across the street from Missouri. I'm also not too crazy about adding teams to the conference that are in a city where they are not the most important team in that city. It's understandable that most people in Terre Haute are IU fans, but at least IU is not in Terre Haute if you get what I'm saying.

Thoughts? (I'm okay with getting roasted.)

EDIT: It also would keep the conference even at 6 public, 6 private.

[E-Villan]

Murray State is in a nice area. The Murray area falls within the Paducah, KY media market which is rated #81. The Paducah market is fairly populous because there are many cities included that are outside of Kentucky. Carbondale, Marion, and Harrisburg, IL are included. Cape Girardeau, Sikeston, Poplar Bluff, MO are included. Even northern Tennessee falls within the market. To compare, Fargo is #117. So, not only does Murray St fit the Valley geographically and brings in a natural rival to several existing schools, it also brings in more households to the Valley than would Fargo.

I certainly agree Murray State is a solid addition, but that Paducah media market is a true anomaly. For several years, I was responsible for placing advertising for a company with offices throughout Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky. The Paducah-Carbondale-Cape media market was created with 3 VHF stations located about 60 miles apart from each other in three different states. These stations also have smaller UHF relay transmitters in places such as Poplar Bluff, MO. This was necessary as this is a large rural area with no principal cities. It is basically covering the area between Evansville, Springfield, MO and Memphis. That's a lot of real estate.

The first words always out of the pretty account rep from Channel 12, was how high their ranking was. That's great if you are selling a national product such as Coke or Chevrolet...but, in our case, our principal response market was within 50 miles of an office. People in Martin, TN or Paragould, AR were not going to drive to an office between Carbondale and Marion, IL to patronize it. We got far better results in markets like Peoria and Evansville, where the population within 50 miles of an office was much greater. I think the same holds true here. I don't think people are sitting around a bar in Paragould, AR eagerly awaiting a SIU game, nor are too many people in Poplar Bluff going to become Valley fans because Murray State is joining.

Like I said, there are a lot of reasons to like Murray in the Valley, I just don't think media market is one of them.

[E-Villan]

After a lot of thought my vote for a 12th team goes to SE Missouri State currently. I am going to (hopefully not falsely) assume in this post that Murray State and Valparaiso are in. No one has really mentioned SEMO, but I don't think they would be terrible add. They are definitely better than adding an extension campus team in my opinion.

Their teams aren't very good right now, but they have the potential (like everyone else) to get better. They went 15-18 in basketball (played competitively against Bradley and MO State twice) and 3-8 in football (played competitively against SIU and INST).

Their location is a big reason why I like them. They are very close to SIU and Murray State and already have rivalries with both of those teams in a way. They are also decently close to Missouri State and would sort of give them a potential rival. IMO the 12th team needs to be someone in Missouri State's vicinity to keep them from feeling "left out".



The city they are in is also decently sized (38K). No it's not a huge city, but it's not tiny either. The city actually owns the Show Me Center (where they play basketball). The fact that the city owns it is not an issue with me either. Bradley's arena for example is owned by Peoria. I feel like I need to clarify that before someone "smart" thinks that's an awful thing.

I

Thoughts? (I'm okay with getting roasted.)

EDIT: It also would keep the conference even at 6 public, 6 private.

Who is the 6th private? Even if Valpo gets added, that only brings it to 5. To have true balance, you would need (2) privates and (1) public added.

You have some decent points for SEMO, but as I just pointed out above, we would now be adding a 3rd school in a market much weaker than it's ranking. We might as well throw in UT-Martin and move the conference offices and tournament to Paducah.