When we say the Valley is terrible, it has nothing to do with the teams not being good teams. It's that the good teams have no consistency in effort, and thus often underperform relative to potential.
The problem with the Valley is that it will always be good enough to beat you on any given day. But it absolutely refuses to be good enough to get more teams to be good enough to get to the NCAA tournament. It's good enough to screw you, but not good enough to help you (RPI and good wins, NCAA tournament shares from multiple bids, etc.). Losing Creighton won't make the 2-8 teams less capable of beating us on any given night. It just makes it very unlikely that any of those teams will be able to contribute to our NCAA resume or make the tournament themselves and thus benefit us via NCAA share money.
Which is the problem. Gonzaga and Butler have been able to make consistent runs because the majority of their conference stinks, so it's easy to dominate them. Nobody dominates the Valley. Never have, likely never will. But yet those conferences get to have just as many, and often times more, tournament bids than us. Being good and deep doesn't do well when none of the middle players seem to want to get past the "good" level and into the "at-large bid" level.
The other problem we have with the Valley is a lack of direction, and too much emphasis put on reducing travel costs for the poorest members of the league, who spend too large a share of their athletic budgets on FCS football. We wish to be a major program, and that's difficult given the state of the Valley. All too often it seems like the mentality of the Valley is to contract, preferring the safest moves possible rather than anything that would give us an opportunity to increase the prestige of the conference.
And anyone who is saying "Just dominate the Valley and there won't be a problem!" is ignoring the entire history of the Valley. That's not the way this conference works. SIU had the most dominant stretch in Valley play that I can remember in the early 2000s, and they won ONE Arch Madness title in that period, despite FIVE regular season conference titles -- and the one time they won the tournament was the one time over that stretch that they didn't win the regular season title. That's just how this conference works -- again, bloodbath. Luckily they dominated in a period where we were able to consistently get multiple bids to the NCAA tournament ... that hasn't been the case over the last six years.
The Valley isn't terrible in that the teams themselves are bad. There's a lot of good teams in this conference that can beat anyone on any given night. It's that this conference being good does absolutely nothing for us. A good conference should get multiple NCAA tournament bids or at least provide opportunities for good wins to build a resume on ... and the Valley doesn't do this. So we get all of the negatives of being in a good conference, with none of the positives. Either suck so we can dominate you or get better so you can help us, but this weird middle level we're at blows.
I am happy that you remembered SIU dominating from basically 2000 - 2007. I believe they had 6 straight NCAA appearances, and 2 sweet 16 appearances (
shameless SIU plug). SIU got a ESPN game day and we (SIU and the MVC) were very close to achieving what you're arguing for. Instead, SIU plummeted and the MVC also got a little weaker going back to a 1 bid league for the next couple of years.Do you remember the year the MVC was a 4 bid league? It was achievable, thanks largely to the fact that the MVC beat up on each other.
I agree with some points you made and that in recent years, the league beating up on each other has been bad for the top teams but to say this is how the MVC has always been is false. By mentioning that 2000-2006 stretch, you acknowledge that yourself. And before Y2K, ANY non big 6 confrence rarely rarely rarely sent mutiple teams to the NCAA
In conclusion,
I say all this to give you a new perspective. First, the MVC was one of the first non BCS conferences to send multiple send mutiple teams to the NCAA tournament. Second, going back just a little nudge over a decade, Creighton and SIU probably have a better resume with this consistency thing you have talked about.
