The Valley has consistently ranked as the nation’s tenth best conference, but have received just six March Madness dance cards during the five, post-pandemic NCAA seasons.
While working the portal during this offseason, MVC coaches made getting bigger a massive priority. Forty players on this year’s Valley’s rosters are at least 6’9. The league that is often called ‘The Big Ten of Mid Major Conferences’, now looks a lot like that conference. Evansville has four players meeting that standard and no player is shorter than 6’3.
For the first time in three years, there are multiple all-conference players returning to their MVC teams. First-teamer Chase Walker and second-teamer Johnny Kinziger stayed put at Illinois State and third-teamer Trey Campbell leads a group of eleven players returning to Northern Iowa’s team.
There are two new head coaches and one fewer team in this year’s Missouri Valley Conference. Eric Henderson replaces the departed Ben McCollum (Iowa) for league champion Drake and former Creighton assistant Ryan Miller is the new leader at Murray State. Missouri State left the league to chase football fortunes in Conference USA. During the Bears’ 34-year MVC history they won four regular season championships and one tournament trophy and none of those titles have happened since 2011.
Drake is the only current MVC team with an NCAA Tournament appearance since the pandemic. The Bulldogs have gone dancing in four of the past five seasons.
Getting bigger is central to the league’s desire to grab multiple NCAA Tournament berths. Can the league get back to its historic success from earlier this century? From 1999 through 2007, at least two Valley teams went dancing with three in 2005 and four in 2006! During the early part of the last decade (2012-2016) the MVC sent two teams dancing during four of those five seasons.