The Valley is the second oldest conference in college athletics, founded in 1907. At various points, Valley membership included Kansas, Kansas State, Iowa State, Oklahoma, Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State), Missouri, Nebraska, Cincinnati, Louisville, Memphis, and St. Louis. Drake is the only remaining original school from the conference's founding, but Bradley and Wichita State have been members since the 1940s.
Big time college football has always been a volatile issue in MVC history. Even the founding date of the conference is disputed, because like the history of the Big East-- where the name remains after a complicated history of consolidation and departures on various grounds, there's some controversy as to whether the old Big Eight Conference (which folded into the current Big 12 in the 1990s) or the Missouri Valley is the original institution. From the Wikipedia page on the Big Eight Conference (written from the perspective that the Big Six/Eight was the original institution, and the MVC was the spin off):
Quote:
At a meeting in Lincoln, Nebraska, on May 19, 1928, the conference split up. Six of the seven state schools (all except Oklahoma A&M) formed a conference that was initially known as the Big Six Conference.[2] Just before the start of fall practice, the six schools announced they would retain the MVIAA name for formal purposes. However, fans and media continued to call it the Big Six. The three private schools – Drake, Grinnell, and Washington University – joined with Oklahoma A&M, becoming known as the Missouri Valley Conference (MVC).[7] The similarity of the two conferences' official names, as well as the competing claims of the two conferences, led to considerable debate over which conference was the original and which was the spin-off, though the MVIAA went on to become the more prestigious of the two. For the remainder of the Big Eight's run, both conferences claimed 1907 as their founding date, as well as the same history through 1927. To this day, it has never been definitively established which conference was the original.
More recently, schools like Tulsa (member from 1935 to 1996) and New Mexico State (member from 1970 to 1983) left to join the old Western Athletic Conference (when it had Utah and UNLV) and Big West (I think... going by memory) conferences respectively, primarily because of football. Those two conferences evolved into the Mountain West (without New Mexico State, who remains in the WAC), and Tulsa later joined the American (including many football-playing former Big East schools). West Texas State left in 1985 to drop to Division II, and Creighton left (for the second time) in 2013.
Right now, football is driving college athletics. The revenue from ticket sales, TV contracts, and chances to tap alumni for donations is immense compared to our little part of the world. At schools like Michigan, Florida, and Notre Dame, football finances their entire athletic departments with budgets bordering on nine figures-- any profit from basketball is just gravy. So the conference alignment is totally dictated by football-- whether you have it, what level you play, how good you are, your football attendance, your football facilities, your rivals in the sport, etc.
Personally, I wonder if the mania for football can be sustained. With medical information about the dangers of playing football, the extreme numbers of scholarships needed to field teams at the college level, land and costs for facilities, saturation of the sport from pee wee to pro, and the potential of alternatives like soccer, I think there's a good chance it will level off, and some chance it could fade. But if the Koch Brothers want to write a check for $90 million and a few other fans and alumni want to join in for a million here and a million there, why wouldn't WSU jump on the bandwagon?
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
