Primarily a collection of news links about all 12 Missouri Valley League teams on a daily basis, culled from online newspapers, school athletic websites, the conference website, and school newspapers, plus some other content from time to time.
Here are the — we’ll say it — largely ugly results:
What we got right:
We’ll keep this short and simple, we more or less nailed
the top 10. Not that that exactly took working the phones and diving
into the per 40 numbers on rotation players. Gonzaga was a bolted-on number one and Loyola Chicago, San Diego State, Western Kentucky, Boise State and St. Bonaventure
either returned large portions of good teams, had a transcendent star
or, some bases, both. But hey, that top 10 looks pretty good
nonetheless.
What we got wrong:
So. Much. Red.
Maybe that’s normal, and maybe one day we’ll crunch the
yearly results on how our preseason poll usually stacks up. That day is
not today, and the preseason list is splotched with scarlet. Some
notable misses:
Northern Iowa, but maybe with an asterisk. The Panthers
seemed poised to rekindle the old dueling thoroughbred nature of the
Valley with Loyola swapping in for Wichita State. That didn’t happen, in
large part because reigning league POY A.J. Green was lost to a
season-ending hip injury after three games. The team pegged to win the
Valley never recovered, and went from flirting with an at-large in
2019-20 to finishing 7-11 in the MVC this year.
It seems overlooking Drake may be a
thing of the past as long as Darian DeVries is in Des Moines. Coming off
an 8-10 league season — and losing Liam Robbins — it made sense they
weren’t a part of the initial OT25. Even with Joseph Yesufu off the
Kansas, the program may have reached a point it gets the benefit of the
doubt going forward.
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