New UW-Milwaukee AD

[rink]

If anyone's interested: http://fox6now.com/2012/05/10/uwm-athletic-director/

Former AD at Brown, Penn, Stanford, Maryland, and Ohio St.  Seems like a big get.  Marquee credentials.  I think the murmors and rumors of adding a football program might have just gotten a little louder....

[bbtds]

Was Geiger leaving Ohio State have anything to do with the Tressel situation at Ohio State?

[VULB#62]

Was Geiger leaving Ohio State have anything to do with the Tressel situation at Ohio State?

Geiger retired from OSU in 2005 and remained with the university until 2006 if that helps.

A look back in SI puts Tressel's resignation at the end of May 2011 (about a year ago)  It also stated that there were 8 years of abuses that led up to that.  So at least 2-3 years of abuses occurred during Geiger's watch.  Probably insignificant early on and then grew later in that 8 year span as they got bolder due to not getting slapped (my guess).

[dylanrocks]

A desperately needed steady hand, Geiger likely wasn't brought aboard to launch football but to raise money for basketball and baseball facilities.

[wh]

A desperately needed steady hand, Geiger likely wasn't brought aboard to launch football but to raise money for basketball and baseball facilities.

As long as he never gives an audience to Jimmy or pays attention to anything he says or writes, everything will be fine.  From the moment Butler announced they're leaving, Jimmy has been running around like a chicken with his head cut off.  He immediately proclaimed on the butler board that the HL is finished.  Since that time he has been doing his best to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.  He's been on MVC boards singing Milw's praises as a great addition to that league.  He told WSU fans that they should move to the OVC.  That went over like a lead balloon.  He has blogged that Valpo will "try like hell" to get into the MVC and that we have other options, as well.  He might as qell be yelling, "Each man for himself, the ship's going down"!  I think I probably read as much as the next.  I know the scenarios, the domino effect talk and all the rest of it.  No one knows (even Jimmy and Title -believe it or not) what the landscape will look 5 years from now.   But I do know one thing.  Smart people look first within for solutions to big challenges.  How can WE (the collective we)  overcome this together?  That's a far cry from "each man for himself".  I said this before and I'll say it again - between our league office and our various athletic depts., I am confident that we have plenty of intelligent people that can figure out a good group solution. 

[BigDWSU]

   I said this before and I'll say it again - between our league office and our various athletic depts., I am confident that we have plenty of intelligent people that can figure out a good group solution. 

I agree with everything you said except the above statement.  I have no faith in LeCrone.  I just made a post on UWMs board about him that I will cut and paste below.

HL schools really need to look at bringing in a new conference commissioner. The A-10 brought in the right person for the job recently. She negotiated a great new TV contract for them 2 years ago putting them on primetime CBS for their conference championship game. She has added Butler to their conference and could end up adding VCU and George Mason in the next year or 2. LeCrone has made one good decision in his tenure: adding Valpo. He completely screwed the pooch by adding YSU.  The HL was going to lose our automatic bid to the NCAAs for one of our sports and when we were unable to add Valpo or Oakland at the time, he paniced and recommended YSU.  Many of us fear he will do the same thing and recommend IUPUI or IPFW.  He has screwed the pooch with his handling of the HLN. I know our fans like it, but overall it has cost our universities money. Overall league attendance has been down ever since it went live. Less fans travel to away HL games now because they can just watch the games online for free. He also has lost us revenue by giving away the product for free. The A-10, for example, uses CBSsportsline for their online games. They charge either $10 a month or $80 a year for their service. That is all revenue we could have been using to benefit our conference/individual teams. Instead WE PAY $200K a year to operate the HLN.  While conferences like the A-10 and MVC enforce scheduling mandates on their teams (if they want to get a full share of their conferences NCAA tournament money), LeCrone encourages our schools to schedule up to 2 D2 teams a year. And most importantly, he lost our top team (Butler) because he wasn't forward think at all. He waited until we lost Butler to bring up conference expansion. If he would have been forward thinking, he would have tried to expand the HL a few years ago and Butler might have been content to stay. For example, if he would have added Oakland, Murray State, Robert Morris and Drexel 2 years ago the HL could be a solid 2-3 bid conference right now with a better TV contract. I doubt Butler would want to be leaving the HL if we had a better TV contract, more NCAA tournament money coming in, and revenue from the HLN. If all of the AD's from the HL were smart they would fire him now and find a qualified replacement before he screws the pooch again.

[chef]

Some very valid points from an a great HL fan. I do agree with some of the points. However, I strongly disagree with the thoughts about the Horizon League Network. If attendance is truly down since the HLN came into fold, I find it hard to believe it's the underlying reason. There has never been any evidence that making sporting events more media accessible hurts attendance. Clearly it could come into play on a real bad weather night. However for the most part, the fans that most likely would use the HLN are out-of-towners. Most locals that watch their team on HLN are also season ticket holders. The majority of their HLN watching are away games. For many years the Blackhawks didn't televise home games for fear of it effecting attendance. After Bill Wirtz died in 2007, home games began being shown on local TV, and attendance has increased every season since. I think the only thing the HLN effects is the amount of people that listen to the games on the radio!

[milanmiracle]

Some very valid points from an a great HL fan. I do agree with some of the points. However, I strongly disagree with the thoughts about the Horizon League Network. If attendance is truly down since the HLN came into fold, I find it hard to believe it's the underlying reason. There has never been any evidence that making sporting events more media accessible hurts attendance. Clearly it could come into play on a real bad weather night. However for the most part, the fans that most likely would use the HLN are out-of-towners. Most locals that watch their team on HLN are also season ticket holders. The majority of their HLN watching are away games. For many years the Blackhawks didn't televise home games for fear of it effecting attendance. After Bill Wirtz died in 2007, home games began being shown on local TV, and attendance has increased every season since. I think the only thing the HLN effects is the amount of people that listen to the games on the radio!

I've got to agree the HLN hasn't hurt my attendance. I can't speak for everybody, but it's helped me follow the team, when otherwise I wouldn't have been able to watch them live. What the HLN has created is a loyal fan base. It's nice to know I can see the games and keep up, therefore I have more interest in the team, and buy tickets and go to games when I get the chance.

Valpo and the HLN need to grow the brand before they can start charging for things...first you bring the fans, then you make they pay for the product when they like it.

[covufan]

I think having the HLN feed, or other on-line video feed, has allowed me to watch the teams between games that I could find on TV.  It affords those fans that are a distance from VU to actually get to know the players, and developing an on-line appreciation for the team.  Anything that helps build a fan-base is a good thing in my eyes.

[VULB#62]

COVUFAN - certainly agree. Being in New England, without the feed I would not have seen VU soccer matches, the HL baseball tourney games and a couple of basketball games.  It has certainly increased my appreciation for the kids and coaches. Today is a good case in point.  I am traveling up in Canada for business and holed up in a hotel room, but I just watched the YSU-UIC game live and am really anticipating the next game.  My only complaint is that the wireless here is not too powerful so the image gets frozen every now and again, but the audio is fine.

[blackpantheruwm]

A desperately needed steady hand, Geiger likely wasn't brought aboard to launch football but to raise money for basketball and baseball facilities.

As long as he never gives an audience to Jimmy or pays attention to anything he says or writes, everything will be fine.  From the moment Butler announced they're leaving, Jimmy has been running around like a chicken with his head cut off.  He immediately proclaimed on the butler board that the HL is finished.  Since that time he has been doing his best to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.  He's been on MVC boards singing Milw's praises as a great addition to that league.  He told WSU fans that they should move to the OVC.  That went over like a lead balloon.  He has blogged that Valpo will "try like hell" to get into the MVC and that we have other options, as well.  He might as qell be yelling, "Each man for himself, the ship's going down"!  I think I probably read as much as the next.  I know the scenarios, the domino effect talk and all the rest of it.  No one knows (even Jimmy and Title -believe it or not) what the landscape will look 5 years from now.   But I do know one thing.  Smart people look first within for solutions to big challenges.  How can WE (the collective we)  overcome this together?  That's a far cry from "each man for himself".  I said this before and I'll say it again - between our league office and our various athletic depts., I am confident that we have plenty of intelligent people that can figure out a good group solution.

- Too late on me not getting an audience.  But football is not going to happen, at least not for several years.  More likely a decade.  I've been saying it on my site and the UWMFreak forum, football is not going to happen because of Geiger or the athletic department and university. It's all the fans - students, alumni and community.  The university is officially going to try and make our program as best like VCU as we can (the most successful program we resemble as a university), but football isn't going to happen for quite awhile unless the students and alumni demand it - and come up with the cash to make it happen.

- Is the Horizon League as we've known it not finished?  This conference has 19 victories in the last decade of tournaments, and Butler's walking out with 15 of them.  Two of our last three non-Butler automatic qualifiers got squashed in the tournament.  Cleveland State did very well, and hopefully will continue to be good.  Valpo will continue to be good.  But what team will we add, or come out of our own ranks, that will even begin to bring back the identity that we've lost with Butler?

- My "madness" and talking up the MVC for Milwaukee came from two things.  First, the website MVCFans.com came to me with a request for a "pitch" of Milwaukee to the MVC.  The site's owner had been talking to media around that conference, and many of them were led to believe that should Creighton go, Milwaukee was going to be a top candidate to replace them.  Second, over a month after I wrote the initial story for MVCFans.com and Butler officially announced its departure, several MVC media began publicly mentioning Milwaukee as a team they'd either like to see poached or have heard something to that effect from conference people.  My push for Milwaukee to the MVC is hardly without ground.  Before that, when Butler was first mentioned as possibly going to the A10, I wrote something on my site saying we should push to go with them. THAT was something that I came up with on my own, clear and without any info from anyone linking MKE to the A10.

- I've been writing, since before you guys joined the conference, that Youngstown State's continued membership in the Horizon was going to bite us in the end.  And it has. So while guys like Title, Big DWSU and I may not have all the answers, we've been around long enough and have invested enough of ourselves into the situation to understand what's going on.  Maybe some of my ideas weren't so great - I'll admit that my proposal to WSU that they should seek OVC membership was based on a belief that it was a stronger geographical fit than the Horizon, which I found out while researching for my last post on the topic that it wasn't - but I'm not going to sit here and blow smoke up everyone's rear end and say "everything's going to be fine, we'll add Oakland and be fine."  If adding Oakland and Oakland alone was an amenable scenario, then why are people still trying to come up with other names: Evansville, Duquesne, Drexel, Murray State, Robert Morris, hell I think someone on the WSU board even mentioned George Mason?  It's because a 10-team H-League with Oakland is a worse conference than the November 2011 H-League, and the drop in identity and brand are even further down the tubes.

As for everyone else:

Big D isn't saying HLN is bad, he's saying that having the schools just pay for HLN is bad.  We need to make money from it, hopefully enough to cover its costs.  Would anyone here be against paying a $50 a year fee, $5 per regular season men's basketball game, $10 HL Tournament game fee?  I would gladly pay that.  Hell, it might even increase production values.

[wh]

b-panther, you (and to an extent dylan) seem to hold a belief that M's success is highly dependent on who you hang with.  On several occasions you stated that the notoriety Butler was receiving would bear fruit for other teams in the league in terms of recruiting.  And yet, in all due respect, in spite of all of Butler's success over several years, M's talent level is no better now than it was when we broke into the league 5 years ago.  You're always competitive but are no closer to being an at-large team now than you were after Pearl left.  And yet you still bemoan the fact that Butler leaving is somehow devastating to YOUR program.  I'm sure a lot of us would be interested in knowing exactly what you think you gained that you're now losing.  And while you're at it, tell us why you think a move to the MVC will elevate your success when being around Butler didn't. 

[vu72]

I'm wondering whether or not there was the same amount of hand wringing when St. Louis left the conference.  Or, how about Notre Dame?  Give it a break.  Butler leaving isn't the beginning of the end of anything.  As I've stated before, The Horizon League is in exactly the same spot it was in before Valpo joined--nine teams.  The difference is that the ninth team is Valpo and not Butler.

The conference can't live in the past, or bemoan the loss of a team that has had great success in basketball--in the PAST.  We need to look to the FUTURE and no one can tell me that Butler will be more successful that Valpo, or Milwaukee or Cleveland State or anyone else going FORWARD.  Get over it.  Valpo and Detroit and CSU were better than Butler last year and Valpo will be the team to beat THIS year.

We can't live in the past anymore than we could have when St. Louis and ND left for greener pastures.  We need to move FORWARD.  As wh said, Butler's success has nothing to do with the remaining teams success.

Here is the conference timeline, for those who thought the world would end at any previous point:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_League#Membership_timeline

[dylanrocks]

Looking to the FUTURE, it would be ill-advised for the H League to execute a one-for-one replacement of Butler.

Outside of the BCS leagues, there's no team capable of replacing the national profile Butler brought to our otherwise modest little conference. Xavier's 1996 departure didn't remotely compare.

To illustrate, the ESPN crawl updated the day's Butler score every 15 minutes while updating other H League contests about every 45 minutes. Despite clearly being on the wrong side of the tournament bubble in '12, a five-minute SportsCenter segment was devoted to discussing Butler's NCAA prospects.

This is why Wright State's Big D is advocating a wholesale re-alignment that goes to at least 12 and possibly as many as 16 teams and includes among others Murray State and Drexel.

If you don't plan on moving FORWARD now, you should expect to be left behind in five years or less.

[wh]

Dylan - No one is questioning that we need to move forward - the only question is how.  Now that "daddy" is dead you and Jimmy think the children should be split up and go with other relatives.  Big D and the rest of us want to find a way to keep the family together and come through this stronger than ever.  One is a holistic approach; the other is strictly self-serving as evidenced by jimmy telling rich aunt valley why you would make a great addition to her family.

[blackpantheruwm]

Dylan - No one is questioning that we need to move forward - the only question is how.  Now that "daddy" is dead you and Jimmy think the children should be split up and go with other relatives.  Big D and the rest of us want to find a way to keep the family together and come through this stronger than ever.  One is a holistic approach; the other is strictly self-serving as evidenced by jimmy telling rich aunt valley why you would make a great addition to her family.

I don't think we should all split. I think we - as in dylan, myself, and Milwaukee - should pursue membership in the stable MVC.

Is that self-serving? You're damn right it is!  You make it sound like we're all brothers and sisters and we need to work through this.  Why would I not want the best possible situation for my own program?  Because Butler left us behind, I have to put the Horizon League over Milwaukee? No, sir.

Tell me - why did you leave the Mid-Continent Conference for the Horizon League?  Answer that question and keep telling me I'm wrong.

[bbtds]

The simple truth is the Mo Valley doesn't need or want Milwaukee and the Panthers won't end up there.

[valpotx]

It's all a moot point until another conference steals an MVC team anyways.  If that were to happen, I would think that we would even have a good chance of consideration.

[crusaderjoe]

Dylan - No one is questioning that we need to move forward - the only question is how.  Now that "daddy" is dead you and Jimmy think the children should be split up and go with other relatives.  Big D and the rest of us want to find a way to keep the family together and come through this stronger than ever.  One is a holistic approach; the other is strictly self-serving as evidenced by jimmy telling rich aunt valley why you would make a great addition to her family.

I don't think we should all split. I think we - as in dylan, myself, and Milwaukee - should pursue membership in the stable MVC.

Is that self-serving? You're damn right it is!  You make it sound like we're all brothers and sisters and we need to work through this.  Why would I not want the best possible situation for my own program?  Because Butler left us behind, I have to put the Horizon League over Milwaukee? No, sir.

Tell me - why did you leave the Mid-Continent Conference for the Horizon League?  Answer that question and keep telling me I'm wrong.

Unfortunately, this is the right answer.  People seem to forget that when VU joined hands and sang "We are the World" in 1993-94 it got gobsmacked.  Now I am not advocating that VU should act in an ungentlemanly manner towards the other 8 members of the HL and that we should immediately explore options.  However, to state that we're all in this together erases the lessons that should have been learned from VU's athletic history.  VU, nor any school, should need to relinquish it's own interests.

[wh]

I will only say this.  There are no shortcuts in life. Milw bears as much responsibility for the HL's current reputation as a 1-bid league as any other program in the conference.  You haven't had an at-large resume since Pearl left and it doesn't appear your anywhere close.  In fact, there are several other programs that are closer than M right now, including CSU, Detroit, Valpo, and even GB.  And yet, rather than discuss what you need todo to become part of the solution, you want to blame the league, your lack of football, or whatever other nonsense for holding you back.  So typical of today's entitlement mindset - look everywhere but within.

You ask me what the difference  is between us leaving the Mid Con and what you want to do in moving to the MVC.  It's simple - we earned a promotion, you haven't.  The same holds true for Oakland, or Butler, or VCU, or Belmont, etc.  They all found a way of rising above the rest right where they were.  They didn't blame their league or their facilities, or any other external factor.  Those are the programs that other leagues find attractive.  This is not rocket science.  I'm pretty sure it's the lecture your new AD would offer up. 

[milanmiracle]

I will only say this.  There are no shortcuts in life. Milw bears as much responsibility for the HL's current reputation as a 1-bid league as any other program in the conference.  You haven't had an at-large resume since Pearl left and it doesn't appear your anywhere close.  In fact, there are several other programs that are closer than M right now, including CSU, Detroit, Valpo, and even GB.  And yet, rather than discuss what you need todo to become part of the solution, you want to blame the league, your lack of football, or whatever other nonsense for holding you back.  So typical of today's entitlement mindset - look everywhere but within.

You ask me what the difference  is between us leaving the Mid Con and what you want to do in moving to the MVC.  It's simple - we earned a promotion, you haven't.  The same holds true for Oakland, or Butler, or VCU, or Belmont, etc.  They all found a way of rising above the rest right where they were.  They didn't blame their league or their facilities, or any other external factor.  Those are the programs that other leagues find attractive.  This is not rocket science.  I'm pretty sure it's the lecture your new AD would offer up. 

I am not going to say that Milwaukee doesn't share in the blame, but on the same note, they need to keep all options open. At this point the Horizon League is a 1 bid conference, much the same as the Summit/Mid-Con. The only difference is Valpo won the Mid-Con and made it to the dance on a regular basis. That and much less travel. So that's the trade off...making the dance on a regular basis, or less travel. Was it worth it? Probably. However, as it stands now, Valpo hasn't been to the dance since 2004. If you aren't going forward, you're going backwards...and not making the tournament doesn't keep you moving forward. I often wonder what would have happend had Valpo forced the issue in the Bryce years about moving on to bigger and better things when they had the momentum to do so?

Butler is taking advantage of that opportunity, so it will be interesting to see where they go from here.

[blackpantheruwm]

I will only say this.  There are no shortcuts in life. Milw bears as much responsibility for the HL's current reputation as a 1-bid league as any other program in the conference.  You haven't had an at-large resume since Pearl left and it doesn't appear your anywhere close.  In fact, there are several other programs that are closer than M right now, including CSU, Detroit, Valpo, and even GB.  And yet, rather than discuss what you need todo to become part of the solution, you want to blame the league, your lack of football, or whatever other nonsense for holding you back.  So typical of today's entitlement mindset - look everywhere but within.

You ask me what the difference  is between us leaving the Mid Con and what you want to do in moving to the MVC.  It's simple - we earned a promotion, you haven't.  The same holds true for Oakland, or Butler, or VCU, or Belmont, etc.  They all found a way of rising above the rest right where they were.  They didn't blame their league or their facilities, or any other external factor.  Those are the programs that other leagues find attractive.  This is not rocket science.  I'm pretty sure it's the lecture your new AD would offer up. 

I suppose I'll have to go talk to him about it then, won't I?

Of course, you tell me that I shouldn't put "blame" on anything. How would you like to have a half-million dollar lease, which cuts into recruiting budget? I guess facilities might be a problem.

The Horizon League will be a viable conference. It just won't be what it was with Butler. If you want to differ with me there, that's fine - people disagree all the time. From my end, I see the Horizon League and I see a better conference whose fans came to me to see about my interest, whose beat writers have called for "poaching the Horizon League of Milwaukee," and I happen to agree with them. This isn't like when I suggested flat-out that we should try and get into the A10. There was no one claiming we were a target, no one asking me if we would join. That was just me. This isn't, hell it wasn't even started by me.  I was focused on what it would take for us to build a program to be worthy of A10 membership when MVC people came knocking on my door. So let's just stop with the Jimmy-bashing. It's getting old, fella.

I'm still in. I'm still going to push for what's best in the Horizon League until I find out otherwise. But don't tell me that if MVCFans.com came and asked you about Valpo, and beat writers around the MVC started talking up Valpo as a target for MVC expansion, that you would ignore it and just continue with the status quo.

I don't care if you "earned it." Right now, you've done the same as Milwaukee in the last five years - you've got a regular season championship that you squandered away in the title game. Of course, we lost to the national runner-up, you lost to a blown-out 15-seed - but that is neither here nor there.  If these people were coming to you and talking up Valpo as the next MVC member, there's no chance in hell that you'd just ignore it.  This is a college message board - half of it is groaning about the past and half of it is speculation on the future. I'm merely speculating on the future.

The thing that pisses me off the most is this:

And yet, rather than discuss what you need todo to become part of the solution, you want to blame the league, your lack of football, or whatever other nonsense for holding you back.  So typical of today's entitlement mindset - look everywhere but within.

Except I have been.  Go to any other board and I'm talking about what our plans are as a conference.  Hell, talk in PM with STLVuFan and Matthew Carter and ask them what I'm working on, then ask yourself if that sounds like someone who is abandoning the League.

[vu72]

Now that you mention it, Valpo would be a better fit than UWM.  Right now there are four privates and 6 publics.  Valpo could help balance that out.  I think you would agree, that as long as Bryce is the head coach our lead sport will be better than yours.

Now, if the Valley is after a better track and field team, there is no contest.

[blackpantheruwm]

Now that you mention it, Valpo would be a better fit than UWM.  Right now there are four privates and 6 publics.  Valpo could help balance that out.  I think you would agree, that as long as Bryce is the head coach our lead sport will be better than yours.

Now, if the Valley is after a better track and field team, there is no contest.

The private/public thing just doesn't make a huge difference.  Having the better basketball team does, although how long is Bryce gonna stick around?

[StlVUFan]

I will only say this.  There are no shortcuts in life. Milw bears as much responsibility for the HL's current reputation as a 1-bid league as any other program in the conference.  You haven't had an at-large resume since Pearl left and it doesn't appear your anywhere close.  In fact, there are several other programs that are closer than M right now, including CSU, Detroit, Valpo, and even GB.  And yet, rather than discuss what you need todo to become part of the solution, you want to blame the league, your lack of football, or whatever other nonsense for holding you back.  So typical of today's entitlement mindset - look everywhere but within.

You ask me what the difference  is between us leaving the Mid Con and what you want to do in moving to the MVC.  It's simple - we earned a promotion, you haven't.  The same holds true for Oakland, or Butler, or VCU, or Belmont, etc.  They all found a way of rising above the rest right where they were.  They didn't blame their league or their facilities, or any other external factor.  Those are the programs that other leagues find attractive.  This is not rocket science.  I'm pretty sure it's the lecture your new AD would offer up. 

wh, this talk is no fun for me either, but that horse left the barn a long time ago.  The whole NCAA Division I College Sports enterprise is beyond corrupt.  I'm still doing a slow-burn over Butler leaving, myself.  The whole notion of conference realignment screams Pyramid Scheme all over the place.  Butler is moving up because they are attractive to the A-10 and vice versa.  So the HL suffers, and to address that situation, what the heck are we looking to do but poach some team from a lower conference, making that conference suffer.  It's trickle-down pain and the whole thing nauseates me.  Villains abound, and we need look no further than our own mirror.

What have the remaining HL schools been doing to rise to the challenge that Butler has thrown down over the past 5 years?  We could trot out the litany, and number one on the list may well be the predominantly football school to the east.  If we haven't been pulling our weight, then it is wrong to try to hold back the one team that has been, and they have a certain right to expect the rest of the teams in their conference keep up with them, etc., etc., well, you get the idea.

My point is this: all schools are keeping all their options open.  They are talking to each other and honoring their commitments and in the meanwhile they are keeping their eye on the landscape.  They are multitasking, being ambidextrous, call it what you will.  All motives are suspect by definition.  The only reason the ground is rumbling is because it started on high and has been rolling downhill for a couple of years now.  The Donald Trumps of College Basketball don't quite have enough power for their own wishes, so they are grabbing for more, because they can and because they have what everybody wants.  Down at our level, we're all scrambling to either save our own tiny ant-hill or scurrying to latch on to a neighboring ant-hill, while the Donald Trumps look on in amusement.

Jimmy, believe it or not, is a budding web-journalist, the pedestrian equivalent of a beat-writer.  He's chosen to play the same game all the schools are playing: keeping options open.  As he stated, somebody in the MVC is obviously interested in Milwaukee and asked him to get together to talk about it (someone I'm guessing in the same kind of role as him).  He's also been interviewed by WXOU (Oakland) about the idea of Oakland joining the Horizon League.  His PantherU has been folded into what is now BrewCityBall.com (I think?) and if I'm not mistaken it's a pay site covering Milwaukee-based sports teams (Bucks, Golden Eagles, Brewers, Panthers, etc..)

I stopped thinking of the HL as a family a year or two ago (and I'm not sure why I ever thought of the Mid-Con as a family or anything close to it -- maybe those neutral-site conference tourneys and lunches with ORU fans had something to do with it).  Now I think that names don't really matter.  I'm a loyal Valpo fan.  What I expect from my team is to be as competitive as possible and to challenge itself as much as is reasonable.  I expect the teams Valpo competes with (whoever they may be) to be as competitive as possible to challenge themselves as much as is reasonable.

Obviously, I've gotten to know some fans from other schools (even they who shall no longer be named) and I'm not looking forward to seeing their teams bolt for greener pastures because it feels like a slap in the face, but the truth is, we're all just fans of our teams.  Come January and February, we're mortal enemies.  November and December and March we tend to root for each other (well, some of us anyway) for various reasons.  Heck, I attended a Butler watch party last April.  And just as quickly as the HL website took down the Butler logos, I just removed the Butler links from my website.  The last couple of postings I didn't take as long to put together   I bear them no ill will, but I've moved on.

The only thing I expect in these turbulent times is that if a HL team moves to another conference (or another team jumps to the HL conference) it should be for well thought out reasons.  I'm not exactly sure what all that means, but I want to hear something more than "the grass is greener elsewhere" or things of that nature.  Given the way Butler has done things the 5 years we've seen it up close, I fully expect that they left for well thought out reasons.  The conspiracy theorist in me still likes to toy with the fact that they left because they lost 4 straight to Valpo, but that's just for fun   I fully expect that if Milwaukee actually leaves for another conference, they will do so for well thought out reasons.  Same goes for any other team.