Is this the worst the Valley has ever been?

[Play Angry]

I am pretty sure the MVC media guide has a year by year list of the Conference's RPI Rank. Someone less lazy than myself can settle this pretty quickly if they feel like looking it up.


My rough recollection is that the all time worst year saw us bottoming out as either the 14th or 16th best conference one season in the mid-90s.

[Redbird Recon]

Just throwing this out there, really have no idea...but what about the year Drake won the regular season and Tourney. That year had to be worse.

Here is the record of every team going into St. Louis in 07-08:

BU 17-14 (9-9)
CU 20-9 (10-8)
Drake 28-4 (15-3)
UE 9-20 (3-15)
ISUr 14-15 (8-10)
ISUb 14-15 (8-10)
MSU 16-15 (8-10)
UNI 17-13 (9-9)
SIU 17-13 (11-7)
WSU 11-19 (4-14)

Definitely not a great year. WSU and UE played the patsy and Drake was the hero. Everyone else just ate each other up.

Illinois State went 13-5 in conference play that season.

[Rambler63]

Yes, the Valley is terrible this year, but many programs are rebuilding and have new coaches, so I guess that is to be expected.

If being the #11 conference with a top 5 team and another at least on the edge of at-large consideration is a terrible year, then this conference is doing just fine.

Conference play cannibalization happens every year in the MVC, nothing new about it this year. The league had a few less wins and a few more bad losses out of conference, mainly because of its youth. It happens. Valley will be just fine.

This.

In 2011, the league got one bid, and the top RPI team was Missouri State with 43. Creighton had an RPI of 122 that year, in McDermott's freshman year. There was only one bid in each of the three previous years before that, too, with only Northern Iowa in 2010 and Drake in 2008 cracking the top 40 in RPI. This year, there are four teams in the RPI top 100, and one in the top 10: Wichita State (8), Indiana State (51), Missouri State (81) and Northern Iowa (88). A fifth team, Illinois State, is bubbling just under the top 100 at 106. That is half the league with an RPI at 106 or better. In the past 35 years, there's only been one MVC team with an RPI ranked above where Wichita State is right now-- Southern Illinois finished with a 7 in 2007.

And with regard to Loyola being a direct replacement for Creighton, as though it was a mutually-agreed to straight up trade, I disagree entirely. It would be the same if (insert your personal, preferred newest member of the conference) was the latest addition. When Creighton announced they were leaving, everybody else should have stepped up and battled for a higher place in the heirarchy. ISUb has performed somewhat admirably in that role, with an RPI at 51 and a quality win at Notre Dame. Just because there's a big gap between Wichita State's improvement and ISUb's improvement doesn't mean ISUb hasn't made a lot of improvement.

Plucking out Creighton's Big East RPI as though it would be the same in the MVC is misleading, because they're playing Marquette and Butler and Providence in conference instead of Missouri State, Drake, and UNI. With a higher profile league, they get to determine their OOC schedule with more options. They played only two road games in the non-con, which they probably foresaw and steered toward years ago in anticipation of McDermott's senior year, and they lost two out of three games in a neutral court MTE. Imagining Creighton in the 2013-14 MVC is bouncing back and forth from unconnected alternate realities. Maybe their RPI would be 28 in the MVC because they might not have been able to play only two non-con road games. And maybe they would have lost a close game to ISUb or at UNI instead of by 13 at Providence.

[TheAsianSensation]

Whenever someone argues about if the MVC is fine at a conference, they forget one important detail - the other conferences.

Conference realignment has changed the hierarchy a bit. The Big East splitting in half, the A-10 adding and subtracting power, WCC adding Pacific, it all matters as well as what's happening internally here.

This season's issues have been buttressed by an above-average year for the A-10 and a miracle season for the WCC. Seriously, look at the W-Ls in the non-con in that conference.

[Play Angry]

Conference RPI Rank taken from p. 159-60 of the MVC Media Guide:

1991-92: 21
1992-93: 15
1993-94: 17
1994-95: 10
1995-96: 12
1996-97: 10
1997-98: 12
1998-99: 8
1999-00: 11
2000-01: 12
2001-02: 12
2002-03: 14
2003-04: 11
2004-05: 8
2005-06: 6
2006-07: 6
2007-08: 8
2008-09: 9
2009-10: 7
2010-11: 11
2011-12: 8
2012-13: 8


In that all-time crappiest year of 1991-92, below are the team by team RPIs:

SW Missouri State: 98
Southern Illinois: 108
Illinois State: 121
Tulsa: 124
Indiana State: 145
Northern Iowa: 213
Wichita State: 219
Creighton: 223
Bradley: 267
Drake: 277





In sum, we are nowhere close to the worst performance in league history. In fact, this is pretty close to the 20 year average.

[TheAsianSensation]

Interesting theory associated with conference RPI.

Before the latest wave of realignment, the last big splash was made from 2003-2005 (ACC going from 9 to 11, Big East supersizing itself, CUSA getting destroyed). So in the "Big Big East" era, the MVC were essentially from 6-9. In the "CUSA as a power conference" era, the MVC hung out from 11-14.

We're entering a new era, and in year 1, we're off to a bad start.

[Rambler63]

In that all-time crappiest year of 1991-92, below are the team by team RPIs:

SW Missouri State: 98
Southern Illinois: 108
Illinois State: 121
Tulsa: 124
Indiana State: 145
Northern Iowa: 213
Wichita State: 219
Creighton: 223
Bradley: 267
Drake: 277

In sum, we are nowhere close to the worst performance in league history. In fact, this is pretty close to the 20 year average.

And there were fewer than 290 D-I teams back then. Now there are 351.