The news came out this week that Belmont is joining the Missouri Valley Conference. This provokes some questions. What’s Murray State going to do? Is the Ohio Valley Conference going to have to fold if they can’t stop the bleeding? How good can the MVC be with Belmont, Drake, Loyola, plus teams like Valparaiso that haven’t been great recently but were at-large bid contenders in recent memory?
That last one’s interesting, and it gets more interesting when you consider Wichita State, which used to be the Missouri Valley’s premier basketball brand. It’s only been four years since the Shockers left the MVC, and while history usually doesn’t work this way, Wichita State’s status as a football-less school (sorry, Ted Lasso fans) means it could have probably made the leap it made (which was to the American Athletic Conference) at any time, which in turn means we could’ve had an even stronger MVC, at least for a short time.
As it stands, I’m skeptical on how good the MVC will be. It’s not impossible that they could turn into a WCC-style league, routinely putting multiple teams onto strong seed lines in the NCAA Tournament, but that sort of thing takes a lot of time, and you probably need one standard-bearer, which probably most realistically was a certain school now playing the likes of East Carolina and South Florida in conference games. One thing I’m curious about, though, is where Wichita State stands now.
The Shockers are in a better league than the Missouri Valley Conference. They play against bigger college brands. They have a better television deal. This isn’t an argument for them to jump back to the MVC. Fun as that would be, it doesn’t make sense. Something that might make sense, though, is independence.
Wichita State’s lack of football makes it a side dish at the realignment table. The school’s nice to have, but nobody misses it if it’s gone. If you removed Wichita State from the AAC, Memphis fans would be kind of bummed, but everybody else? I have a hard time thinking they’d be distraught. Contrarily, if you could get Wichita State on your schedule for a home-and-home? That could be pretty fun. You might even be willing to do it during the conference season, especially if you’re a mid-major yourself and the Koch money is cutting a check. You can kind of see it, if you squint: Wichita State plays an inverse schedule, barnstorming against power conference schools through November and December before turning their attention to buy games in January and February. They’re a big enough brand by now to be on the selection committee’s radar. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being independent in college basketball.
The reason this wouldn’t actually work, I assume, is that Wichita State needs a home for its other athletic programs, and men’s basketball gets those other teams seats at the table. So unless Wichita State was valuable enough for television to inspire an ACC/Notre Dame-like deal, it isn’t happening. But it’s fun to think about.
