Love the enthusiasm on this board... The OVC does not have this. We do for Racer nation, but the conference as a whole just does not give a crap.
Murray St guy here and I really hope that we can make this happen. For years now our OVC administration has been, to put it nicely, a joke. From keeping the tournament at Municipal Auditorium that is in horrible shape, to the addition of SIU-E when we had Northern Kentucky basically begging to come in. Since we divided in to the god forsaken east and west divisions... ugh... we have lost all of the old rivalries except Austin Peay. Belmont has been a thorn in our side the last few years, but regardless of what ESPN says they are not our most hated rival. OVC officiating is HORRID. And I mean horrid. Not like Kentucky death threat horrid, but it's bad.
I would like to point out also to add to some of the posts I've seen on here about our tradition of winning is that we also hold a CIT championship from 2014. I know it's a CIT and whoopee to some, but we beat some really good teams to win that tournament. If you look at our RPI you have to factor in our conference influence on that. We traditionally have teams sub 300 in the RPI and have done nothing to improve themselves in the basketball area.
We travel well as the Evansville fan said. SIU and Evansville have long been regional rivals to us and usually are great games. This year we sucked it up, but we've also had to rebuild basically our whole team from when Prohm bolted. A lot of young guys and new faces but we will get better. But our track record against the MVC has proven that we can and should compete well in the conference. I love our series with SIU and Evansville more than I like our OVC games. And when we had the Indiana St. series that was a great series too. Illinois St. the past 2 or 3 years (can't remember if we played 2 or 3) have been great games.
For the campus we traditionally have a large number of students from the St. Louis area and this may be a great recruiting tool for the university in that aspect. It is not the largest city or campus, but we eat, sleep, and live basketball. You cannot go anywhere in town and not here about the game last night or what kind of team we will have next year.
I do not see Belmont being open to the idea of joining based on they joined the OVC to reduce costs. That goes for travel and the such. And also they just do not have the fan support. They have Vince Gill that pours who knows how much $$$$ in to the university, and also is allowed to have conferences with officials and make them question calls during games and we do have proof of that if you would like to see it. Another example is when they played Tennessee St., both teams in Nashville, less than 1,000 people showed up to watch it. And they were the first place team in the conference. There just is not any college basketball support in Nashville unless you are Vandy and even they struggle. Period. It's just hard for me to see them joining. And that's not because they have beat us the past few years and I don't want them to follow us.
So glad to be on this board to discuss and hopefully we will be seeing each other soon.
