Let's face it: the Mid-Continent is a wasteland of a conference. Valpo fields a strong team each year and could benefit froma conference switch. It would seem to me that the Horizon would be a good fit for them, with only 9 teams right now.

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Mid-Con was a conference developed of leftovers in the early 90's. Many original members have moved on to more regional conferences.

Valpo is definitely the big fish in this little pond. The question is whether they like this status. Five straight NCAA appearances finally snapped this year by IUPUI. Valpo has been the representative to the NCAA basketball tourney almost every year from this conference. Are they willing to give that up to be in a more competitive group? They should be. But it is almost a "free ticket" to the dance. :)

The Horizon is the only logical fit if they did move. The Mid-Con is also picking up Centenary out of Louisiana for next year. This on the face of it makes no sense, but perhaps you are on to something here KingCal. Maybe the Mid-Con is hedging their bet.

Also, if the Big Sky doesn't pick up the Dakota schools they may look to the Mid-Con for membership. This might allow the Mid-Con to offer 1AA football. Another possibility. It's definitely a "leftovers" conference.

Well I'm telling you right now that the Mid-Con has two schools ready for a larger conference and the school closest to making the jump is not Valparaiso. Yes, Valpo may have had recent success in men's basketball with about five straight trips to the NCAA Tournament, including a Sweet 16 appearance. Don't think for a minute that the recent success is going to lock you into a move though. A different team has gone to the NCAA Tournament the last three years (Southern Utah, Valpo and IUPUI). The conference has began to level out some.

The school that I believe is ready to make the change the right now is Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. ORU has had the best attendance in the conference every year for the past six seasons (since joining the conference). Also ORU dominates in baseball and volleyball. ORU has also gone to the NCAA Tournament in women's basketball two of the last five years and had an all-american. ORU has a basketball only facility (Mabee Center) which seats about 10,500 and has great attendance for a Mid-Con school. Averaged over 5,500 this year, which is more than Western Kentucky (Sun Belt). Mid-Con schools aren't going to have good attendance when you play schools like Chicago State and IUPUI (I don't care if they made it the NCAA Tournament, nobody sees the name and not laugh). ORU baseball is going to be a big motivator for ORU to start looking for a new conference.

Anyways, I'm for Valpo and ORU to move to a bigger and better conference. They are ready to move up and compete with big name mid-majors on a regular basis. Both programs have a loyal followings.

If interested, take a look at a preliminary draft of a new conference I have come up with recently. I see turning the conference into a 12 member league would not be a bad idea and I think dropping a team and adding someone else wouldn't be a bad idea. Also, as I've already posted on my message board, St. Louis has several options right now and alliances the more I read.

New Basketball-Only Confernece
http://www.voy.com/148588/

At one point in the 1970s, Oral Roberts was ranked in the top 20. Oral Roberts was also a charter member of the MCC (Horizon League) but left the conference (and the NCAA) in the late 1980s rather than face impending sanctions for NCAA violations.

While Valparaiso has had relative success in the Mid-Con in the last decade or so, note the level of competition. While Valpo was a charter member of the then-AMCU8 in 1982, all but two members (Western Illinois) being the other have moved on to bigger and better things in the Missouri Valley Conference (Northern Iowa, Southwest Missouri State) Horizon League (Cleveland State, Illinois-Chicago, Wisconsin-Green Bay), and Ohio Valley Conference (Eastern Illinois). Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Wright State both became members of the Horizon League despite being relatively new to Division I.

The Valparaiso "dynasty" has been padded against the likes of Southern Utah, UMKC, IUPUI, Northeastern Illinois, Chicago State, etc., etc. Not to discount their accomplishments in the 1998 NCAA Tournament, but Valpo has been playing with a stacked deck in a conference with transient membership. Nonetheless, if the school were located in a more accessible location, it is highly likely that they would be a Horizon League member and provide another private, religious school to be grouped with the likes of Butler, Detroit, and Loyola.

First off, I feel the need to defend my (current) school... You think the rest of the country doesn't laugh at having Oral in the school's name? Ok, enough with the school name bashing, main topic is how the Mid-Con is planning on expanding. If the MCC does expand further West, say with the Dakota State schools and possibly picking up the indie Texas schools then the move to the Horizon would be the most logical not only for Valpo but for IPI as wellboth geographically and competitively. Number one, it comes built in with cross-town and intra-state rivalries (Butler and Valpo), and number two, it puts both schools a lot more geographically closer (actually VU is not too far from either UDM or Butler) to their competition, versus trips to deep-south Texas, the Dakotas, and southwestern Utah. Then we'd really be able to see how Valpo and Butler really stack up against each other, which will likely turn into a 3-way rivalry once IPI develops more and gets used to the D-1 shoes.

IUPUI 79 @Valparaiso 67... I wouldn't quite say the dynasty's still intact ;)