(04-05-2017 09:32 PM)Michael in Raleigh Wrote: Question for Shockers fans: What ever happened to the Valley? It seems like not all that long ago, the Valley was about on par with the A-10. I remember you guys, Creighton, Northern Iowa, SIU, Indiana State, Drake (one year at least), and Bradley all making noise in the Dance, especially in the late 2000's and early 2010's. More recently it's been a 1-2 bid league. Why the dropoff?
Quite a few factors played into it.
First, much of the success was based on scheduling requirements that included penalties for poor SOS. It clearly worked, but eventually the lower performing schools decided that they didn't want to face such penalties and voted them away.
Second, some of the reason for voting away the penalties was that a lot of schools in the MVC are in states that have been facing major budget crises (Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri have all demanded major cuts to their state schools). This weakened the investment of a number of schools in their athletic programs.
Third, these budget problems coincided with some of the stronger programs in the league making poor hiring decisions, especially SIU and Bradley. These were two of the programs with strong track records of success and willingness to invest, so their production tanking really hurt the league.
Fourth, the Valley has been one of the victims of poaching of players by bigger conferences. A lot of good MVC talent has ended up transferring elsewhere, particularly to B10 programs.
Fifth, all the budget crunch created a gap between the the schools that were willing to invest heavily in athletics (WSU and Creighton) and those whose main concern was saving as much money as possible. Outside of WSU and Creighton, there were a couple of schools still interested in investing, but with limited resources, and everyone else mostly thought small-time. What is worse, the MVC did nothing to appease the concerns of WSU and Creighton. Both schools wanted the conference tournament closer to them since they supplied most of the fans anyway (like in Kansas City). Both of them wanted schools that actually go to the NCAAs to get a bigger cut. These and other suggestions were rejected outright. Had some of the budget problems and bad hires not happened, the voting block of schools might have looked different, but as it played out the little schools that were content to be small time and save money were able to control the conference's direction.
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