Leatherneck Nation

Some of our fans think we might be going OVC for football-only.

The green dots account for my new pretend OVC FCS conference:

Current members:
Austin Peay
EIU
Murray State
Southeast Missouri
Tennessee State
Tennessee tech
UT Martin

Additional:
WIU
ISUr
ISUb
Southern Illinois

From a geography standpoint, you could bus to every game and it wouldn’t be too long of a trip. I’d also say add one more team in the Indiana or Kentucky area. It is also not lost on me that all these other schools have other sports to worry about. This is purely speculation and what a Illinois/Tennessee football conference would look like. Also, in this hypothetical world, this conference would be pretty decent, and give ISUr the top contender every year in football.


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Sycamorefan96 wrote: Fri Jan 29, 2021 3:05 pm Some of our fans think we might be going OVC for football-only.

It would make sense if the OVC is cool with it. You guys are closer to most of them than we are, but there's obviously big advantages (and lots of history) to you guys sticking with the MVC for Basketball and other sports.

WIU2DC wrote: Fri Jan 29, 2021 3:08 pm From a geography standpoint, you could bus to every game and it wouldn’t be too long of a trip. I’d also say add one more team in the Indiana or Kentucky area. It is also not lost on me that all these other schools have other sports to worry about. This is purely speculation and what a Illinois/Tennessee football conference would look like. Also, in this hypothetical world, this conference would be pretty decent, and give ISUr the top contender every year in football.

The thing is about ISUr, ISUb, and SIUC is that their other sports are already in a non-football conference, so if the OVC was ok with it, it could only be a football switch to make that move. Personally I'd love to see that happen. ISUr's rivalry game with EIU becomes a conference game, as does SIU's rivalry game with SEMO. Our rivalry game with ISUr stays intact, and we get back the old WIU/EIU rivalry in all sports. The ISUs and SIUC can keep all their other sports in the MVC if they want.

Really the only thing I'd miss out of that is not making fairly regular trips to see away games at the UNIDome. That's only a 3 hour drive for me and my wife has family in the area, so we can go to the game, visit them, make a weekend trip out of it. Plus 2 out of the 3 games I've seen at the UNIDome have been exciting WIU wins ("The Kick" by Scifres and the one a few years ago when we got 9 points in the last 6 seconds).

I definitely believe WIU will pursue this. It’s a matter of whether the OVC picks us.

As for MVFC schools joining OVC as FB-only, I don’t even see that in the range of realistic possibilities.

In the unlikely event they actually broke off from the Dakota’s, they’d just stage their own conference with the MVC-5 bringing YSU as an affiliate #6. Murray would be #7 if the MVC adds them.

They would do that before merging with 7 OVC schools in FB.

may know wrote: Fri Jan 29, 2021 9:18 pm

I definitely believe WIU will pursue this. It’s a matter of whether the OVC picks us.

At this point, I'm just hoping we are coming along with you guys for football. I'm so sick and tired of sending our football team to Timbuktu every other week. If we were in the OVC I could wake up at 6 or 7 in the morning and go to every game, home or away. Every OVC opponent is within 5 hours of Terre Haute except Tech which is 5 and a half hours away, and that would only be an every other year trip. I also think without WIU we would have to start sending our team to the Dakotas twice a year due to a lack of regional opponents, which is something we were promised we wouldn't have to do.

Not going to get my hopes up to high or to excited until it actually looks like a realistic possibility.

illinois state just got dropped by Drake for 35! rock bottom.

good to see loyola doing well, buddy went there, lovely campus.

Gryanwood wrote: Thu Feb 04, 2021 6:04 am illinois state just got dropped by Drake for 35! rock bottom.

good to see loyola doing well, buddy went there, lovely campus.

Good to see that the Valley has a good chance of two teams making the tournament again.