The OVC is not going to collapse. But it's becoming a bottom feeder. A league without any passionate fan bases and declining student interest. The refrain one hears over and over is only Murray and Belmont have any fan bases at all in basketball, and they are the only programs who invest in it (their budgets blow the rest of the conference out for Basketball, which is the leagues primary sport). Several schools are near the bottom of D-I in budgets. Simply put Murray State doesn't feel like they belong there anymore.

It is interesting that SIUE has been quietly active from the moment they got into the OVC to land somewhere else, having flirted with the WAC back when they took UMKC and last year with the Horizon. While they are one of the few relatively healthy Illinois schools with good leadership (rare in Illinois) they are not super attractive, lacking any athletic tradition nor having much of a fan base. Still they clearly see the OVC, like Murray State, as somewhere to get out of. But that doesn't seem to be true of any other schools beyond Murray and SIUE. Belmont is content, and the others are threadbare programs lacking ambition. (Well there has been the odd rumor that EKU wants to move up to FBS, but that is a long long long road from where they are, and it's hard to see a taker).

So there are not many vultures circling around the OVC, pretty much for the same reasons with the SLC, as there is not much meat left on the bone.