VUGrad1314 wrote:racernation wrote:Not in the MVC yet, but the Racers move to 20-2 last night by beating Morehead 77-66. Morehead was unbeaten in conference play. The Racers and Auburn are the only two teams in the country with 20 wins.
Not saying Murray State will struggle to the same degree Valpo has in the MVC (I think we can all agree that Murray State is the superior overall program given their decades long track record through multiple coaching hires albeit against lesser competition for the past 15 years or so) but with absolutely no days off in the MVC the Racers will find it much more difficult to rattle off win streaks like this in this conference (unless they are even better than even I thought they were and are going to dominate from the jump which seems unlikely). There are no easy games in this league even the bottom teams play the top teams tough. Any MVC team has to come to work every night in order to win.
Agreed. That said, if the current team stays intact, I fully expect Murray to contend for the conference championship. There are a couple players on our team who would be seniors this year but because of the extra COVID year, they have the opportunity to come back. If they all come back, it could be one of the best teams Murray has ever had and we will be right up there with MoState and Drake. If they go pro (which I think is more likely than not), we'll still be decent, and I would project us to finish somewhere in the middle of the conference. If we lose our coach, which tends to happen to us quite a lot, then it's anybody's guess what kind of team we have, but it surely won't be good by MVC standards.
That, more than anything else, will be the difference going to a new league. In the OVC, we could lose half the team to graduation or deal with a coaching change and still contend because the OVC was that bad. There used to be a lot of racer fans and many within the University that wanted to stay in the OVC simply because we could dominate that league and go to the tournament most years. We were, apologies to any fellow racer fans offended by this, a lot like UK in that we could go out and recruit a bunch of new guys (Murray has had a lot of success with transfers and recruiting out of Junior colleges), who were just way more talented than the teams we played against so even if they had some problems, the talent won out. I don't expect that to be the case going forward.
