Sub .... great job with the roster posting. I agree with where you have the Ramblers pegged for the 2013-2014 season + / - one place in either direction, which would be a success for the first MVC season given how young the team is. I know it's early, but I am going out on a limb here in July ... The Ramblers will have two big MVC upset wins at home ... will one of them be the Shockers ... only time will tell!!

BROT has been mashing names for years--in good fun and respect--Swella -bella called it to my attention--YUP I am hungry but it appears to be Luigi's Pizza tonight--Closest thing we have to Chgo style.

In any case, our team will bed no pushovers--BUT the VALLEY is NOT the Horizon--Ramblers will be ready for the upgrade.

I noticed this over on the Shockernet board. Seems like quite a few MVC fans have brightened their outlook on Loyola. If you'd done the standings projection three months ago, I doubt anyone would have put Loyola higher than 9th.

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MBB Scholarship Chart

Based on watching 2 1/2 decades of Loyola basketball, if I had to make two rock-solid MVC predictions right now, it would be that Wichita State finishes #1 in the conference and Loyola finishes #7.

The WSU prediction is pretty safe, because they are that much better than anyone else in the league. The Loyola prediction also seems somewhat obvious, because if there's one thing Loyola knows how to do, it's play basketball well enough to turn heads and bad enough to turn stomachs. My guess is Loyola ties for 5th in the league, but drops to 7th on the fourth tiebreaker, which requires the Ramblers to play on Thursday in St. Louis. Another prediction: Loyola beats the #2 team during the regular season, but loses twice to one or more 6-10 seeds.

63 ... understand your frustration ... overall how do you feel about the talent level of the current team vs. recent years ... could / should make a big difference in changing some of the end results we have seen of late! Anyone have any thoughts on this?

While we have had some decent players in the past I think the coaching and overall program has taken a step up. I think we make far fewer mental mistakes and are in better shape. Also I think it is hard to say what the level of talent is because we were so young last year that word potential comes into play. Some of these guys appear to have lots of promise and this year should tell us what is what after a year of experience and training. But we certainly saw some glimpses last year of some really good possibilities. Osbourne is incredibly athletic, White seems like he has the stuff to be a really good point guard( loved his assist to turnover ration last year). Williams, Oleary certainly showed glimpses. Turk had as many negatives as plusses but he again has a year under his belt. You have King and Doyle who we will get our first glimpses at.
My two concerns are the loss of the assistant coaches and the Loss of Cully Payne. While I dont think Payne would be the guy he certainly would have given us great depth at point guard plus a little more experience.
Get anxious for the season.

If you're looking for an upper half team to "upset", I'd look at UNI. Their style of play is typically slower which keeps most games close no matter if they're winning or losing. They haven't typically had the athletes to push the pace. I'm not sure what your style is, but if you can get out on them early, they can be in trouble. Otherwise, as long as it remains close, you always have a chance.

They don't have a lot of size, but they typically have shooters and play smart, fundemental basketball and are very well coached. Jacobson is definitely one of the best coaches in the MVC and he recruits to his style and it works.

Indiana State and WSU should be the top two teams as they return a lot. ISU didn't graduate a single player off of last years team and are a a solid bunch. Lansing is also a hell of a coach and a pretty decent recruiter as well. I hope ISUb can hang onto him.

7th is definitely possible for you guys as well. I don't see how you finish below SIU or Drake this year. ISU has some questionmarks and Evansville lost A LOT. Simmons is a good coach though and UE always plays touch. One of you will avoid Thursday and I believe it's you guys. While you may be young, so are both of those teams. The difference is, I think your young guys got a lot more valuable experience than what either of them have returning. And I wouldn't rule out a 5th place finish. MSU has some good young talent and get back their best player from injury, but I'm not sold on the coaching ability of Lusk.

And if you guys upset us this year, enjoy reading ShockerNet, but don't chime in. We're a pretty good group to "outisders" as long as it's a respectable sort of dialogue. Some light/fun trash talking is good. But beating on us when we go into meltdown mode doesn't go well with the posters or admins. And we get pretty negative with every loss. In our minds, we shouldn't lose more than a couple of games all season.

And as far as tiebreakers go, I don't think we even have 4 options. First one is head to head. If that doesn't solve it, I believe it goes straight to non conference strength of schedule. We're big fans of playing tougher schedules as it benefits the top teams in conference play and gives us a better chance of getting multiple bids. I think they may have brought back some sort of monetary punishment if the SOS is below 150 or something. It used to be that way and then they did away with it. The conference got weaker so they brought it back I believe. Not sure if it's in full effect yet and I'm sure you have a few years to upgrade accordingly.

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The Roundhouse

SubGod22--

I was being a bit facetious in my above comment. Many of those highs and lows have happened to our team REPEATEDLY, so I was kind of harkening back to some of our notorious successes and disappointments. Hopefully, a lot of those stunning ignominities will be left behind with our Horizon League membership.

We're pretty well acquainted with UNI. We've played them many times, usually getting blown out at their place and either winning or losing a close one at home. In one game at Loyola, I sat next to UNI AD Rick Hartzell, who asked me a few questions about the Loyola players. He has also officiated a lot of our games.

Loyola fans are not great smack-talkers, and we rarely even try. Catholics usually don't make great bullies. We've become gracious winners in large part because we've had a habit of playing great (not always winning, but at least impressive) against very good teams (like Butler, mostly) and sometimes stunningly, incredibly bad against some lousy ones (Youngstown State and UIC come to mind). But having been in the league with Butler (and to some extent UW-Milwaukee, especially during the Bruce Pearl years) for a long time, we've got some good experience standing up for ourselves, and trolls usually find themselves ruefully regretting their hubris.

Tiebreakers were crucial in our last league, because the #1 and #2 seeds got byes into the semifinals, and #4, #5, and #6 got home court advantage in the first round of the conference tournament. The tiebreaking scheme was elaborate by necessity, eventually ending in a coin flip to decide which teams would be subject to another coin flip. One of my many arguments against the most stratified conference tournament seeding scheme in all of college basketball was that conceivably, you could have one 8-8 team get home court throughout the tournament, and not one but TWO byes straight into the semi-finals--- while another 8-8 team would have to play and win four games, all on the road, literally never knowing for sure where their next game would be. And this rather significant difference could be determined solely by whether you called "heads" or "tails."

Yes. That's how messed up the Horizon League is. And that entire scheme was set up because Loyola reached the tournament final in 2002.

After reading that, you'll enjoy STL in early March. It's a lot more straight forward, but SOS is a big deal so schedule accordingly.

I had to laugh about your comment that Catholics don't make great bullies. I'm not a big fan of anybody being bullies, but our departing friends at Creighton were very good at trying their best to do it. Not that WSU doesn't have it's fair share of those. We have a few that are notorious for it on MVCFans. I do enjoy some friendly banter though and I will always try to be respectful of your place when I visit here.

And to be honest, I'm shocked at how excited I'm becoming to have you guys in the MVC and seeing what you do athletically. I was pretty displeased when the announcement was made that you guys were the choice, but I suppose the Presidents had a lot more info to go on than what we did as fans.

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The Roundhouse

Although I'm really high on the new level of professionalism in the athletic department, I am not sold on Porter Moser's abilities. Exhibit A for me on doubts about Porter Moser was the loss at home to YSU last year. We had a 20+ point lead with approximately 16 minutes left, yet we lost. Had we won, we would have been 2-0 in conference with a road win against the eventual conference champion. The blown lead and loss at home to YSU made our win against Valpo on the road look like a fluke. There were other examples of big leads that turned into losses over the year.

This was compounded by my frustration at Moser unnecessarily cleaning house in his first year-- when we had Walt Gibler, Ben Averkamp, Jordan Hicks, and Christian Thomas-- yet we lost 17 of 18 conference games to set a new record for conference futility. Why? Because Moser dumped Courtney Stanley and ran off a lot of experienced players. Three dumped Loyola players that we really could have used to prevent THE WORST CONFERENCE RECORD EVER OF ANY HORIZON LEAGUE TEAM ended up playing for St. Leo in Division II, and took them to the Division II tournament. JR Blount is now an associate head coach at St. Leo.

We've had great talent many times before, without very much to show for it. Consider the 2001-02 Loyola team, which had David Bailey, Louis Smith, Corey Minnifield, Ryan Blankson, Jonathan Freeman, Kevin Clancy, DaJuan Gouard, the Smith twins (Anthony and Antoine), Silvie Turkovic, and Vas Tsimpliavidis. That's two NBA D-League players (Bailey and Minnifield), three foreign pros, two college and high school coaches, and two more capable of making a living in hoops except for their education in more lucrative fields.

Or---- consider the lineup in 2004-05: Blake Schilb, Majak Kou, Tyrelle Blair, DaJuan Gouard, the Smith twins, Tracey Robinson, Tom Levin, Chris Logan, etc. That team went 13-17.

In 2005-06, we lost Blair, Gouard, and the Smiths, but we gained JR Blount, Kye Pattrick, Leon Young, and Brandon Woods. Darrin Williams also became active. That team went 19-11, 8-8 in conference.

For most of the 2000s, we had better talent and raw athletic recruits than any other school in the Horizon League. That's just a plain FACT. What we lacked was a cohesive system, the will and discipline to enforce our game plans, assistant coaches that could back up the coach, continuous recruiting efforts, an emphasis on basketball IQ, and an effective coaching regime that could make the most of our talent. All of these weaknesses were due to underfunding. To this day, I steadfastly believe that if Tyrelle Blair had remained at Loyola, we would have gone to the tournament in 2007.

There's a good reason that Jim Whitesell ended up at St. Louis, that Patrick Baldwin went to Missouri State and then to Northwestern under Chris Collins, and that Howard Moore went to Wisconsin and then to be head coach at UIC: That was a helluva staff that simply didn't have the time or the resources to erase a losing mentality. We've got that volition now, but I'm not sure if we have the talent or perseverance given a generation of failure. Then again, this is a good chance to test the totally believable hypothesis that the Horizon League was systematically holding us back.