https://twitter.com/tiptonedits/status/1901725176548426111?s=46&t=91kudqUdAKY7_I6pel-Quw
All Wright is entering the transfer portal, but he has left the door open for a potential return.
Paul states what many are feeling (w)right now:
Powell states what many of you scrooges need to hear
I feel so sorry for Roger. He finds 2 young players that no one wanted, developed them into league stars overnight, only to lose them because Valpo has no NIL money to entice them to stay. There is no path forward from here.
Governor of West Virginia announces the state is opening an investigation of NCAA basketball:
You could tell that All would put in for the portal, once he started to shine a bit. He's going to have a similar road as to what Sheldon Edwards did, where he won't get the same shot freedom as a 4th or 5th option at a higher level school, but probably end up with a solid final 2 years of play. I have to assume that Carson will put in for the portal, as well, or maybe the hope is that he takes Cooper's minutes and blossoms, so that he can get a fat paycheck next year at this time? I will say that "kids these days" don't have the chip on their shoulders that their predecessors did, when the large programs turned their nose up on them. It's just "give me the check," versus work hard to beat those guys and do something that matters. I think that all small mid/low mid-major school records are safe moving forward, as if you get that inkling of success, you just sell your services to higher bidders.
Depressing again, but not surprising. All is much better than Sheldon and I Highly doubt Wright comes back. I digress. Isn't Valpo a fairly well off community. Are their any known companies/businesses assisting VU with the NIL? I mean more that the radio advertisements and little banners in the ARC. I'm clueless on ALL this.
Concur, Powell is caught in a very difficult spot. Who knows, not being irrational, but maybe he leaves sooner than we think, do to the financial obstacles. Searching for any optimism here.
The small schools VCU, Gonzaga, GCU, St. Mary are staying afloat/consistently winning. How are they doing it? Who else am I leaving out? Very small % of the small guys are successful. Now it's shrinking
The bottom line is this. Valpo as a program has always had success when it's been ahead of the curve. From the early Homer Drew days in making use of the transfer rule (Schmidt, Redman(sp?), etc. Or when Scott joined as an assistant, recruiting Europe before it was a thing (Barton, Tony, Big Z) etc. Since the Drews left we've been behind the curve and have failed to adapt. We are now too far behind the curve to catch up. Basically every decision that has been made in regards to the Men's Basketball program since Bryce left, from the hiring (& extension) of Lottich, the decision to move to the MVC, to the lack of NIL....has been the wrong one.
To be fair, Mid Major college basketball is on its death bed. In 4-5 years the NCAA as we know it will not exist. Maybe Valpo can be at the forefront when the Power 5 split away, but recent history will show we cannot trust our leadership to make the right decisions to keep us ahead of the curve.
Homer did not say "we are going to do it again"..."we are not going to change."
I think you’re reading too much into a throw away comment. Let’s see what happens in the off season and the team we put in the floor in October.
I have to agree with MJ08. Roger is talking about his coaching philosophy of mentoring and developing young men both physically and spiritually. He is not going to change in that regard. He is also not saying that he won't recruit high level DII players or DI players that need court time.
What I haven't heard anybody say is that MM CBB is now a complete crap shoot every year. How accurate will the preseason MVC polls be in the upcoming years??? Nobody is going to know what is happening from year to year. Did any pundit think Drake's DII players would be 30-3??? Did Bennett Stirtz get any preseason votes for POY??? How much NIL money did Bennett Stirtz get this year??? Did anybody think Stirtz would be on some of the First Round NBA Draft boards??? Does any pundit know who the next DII or NAIA player will be the Stirtz of 25-26??? Powell has as much chance of getting 2 or 3 of those guys as anybody else in the MVC, maybe better because he has proven he has an eye for undervalued talent and can develop players.
Do I like it? Heck no... it stinks that a college game that I loved has come to this...
@fwalum i have to be honest, I thought McCollum would be successful based on his success at NWMo St. I mentioned this guy can coach in the past and many thought I was off. I had no doubt his coach8ng and players at Drake would be successful. Also, I don’t care about preseason predictions as the real results is all that counts.
Had the previous athletic administration and Heckler not moved us to a league we cant win we may be watching the team play this week....such a stupid move...chasing a 2 bid conference...then loyola wins and moves conferences...we are stuck in a 1 bid league again....and to add insult to injury all of our other sports teams get pummeled as well.So glad those people are not here anymore...epic fuckup
McCollum had a whole top end D2 team ready to move with him to Drake. That's a one-off and not really replicable for us. It wasn't like it was a case where he was a master scout and found all these diamonds in the rough last summer -- he already had those players for 3-4 years and developed them.
We're really screwed in our present situation because we have both the worst facilities and the worst NIL in the MVC. In the past, we could overcome the facilities through the quality of our coaches because NIL didn't exist at the mid-major level. Now, NIL is more important than coaching. And our NIL is trumped by the rest of the league.
The only way out of it is to position ourselves into a league where our NIL is competitive near the top. It's not going to happen in the MVC. A few posts above mentioned VU "being ahead of the curve" and the way VU could be "ahead of the curve" in this new era is by becoming the first school to downgrade conferences so we can be in a league where our NIL is near the top and we can realistically regain and sustain success as an annual contender.
This is not worth even wasting breath on. CBB as we loved it and Valpo basketball and a whole is dead until regulation comes to NIL and the portal. I can only hope VU is still a university when that change happens.
until then, I’ll be focusing my energy on less corrupt sports.
🍺🍿 Time to sit back with some popcorn and that beer over there and casually watch the demise of big time (including Mid-Major) athletics brought about by NIL and the greedy P5/football/BB powers.
The next step in this process is when someone challenges the tax exempt status of these colleges and universities who pull in trainloads of cash from athletics and shamelessly act as conduits of even more cash to 19 year old kids who aren’t even really “students” - just hessians playing for money to enrich themselves and their “employers”.
The final step will be when the courts eventually make it so onerous that many universities will opt out of athletics and adopt the European model where kids come to school only to learn and earn a degree 😱. Any athletics will be done on a club level outside the bounds of academia. Huge campus stadiums and BB arenas will fall into disrepair and be demolished for parking lots and academic buildings.
It’s a snake eating its own tail a d eventually consuming itself.
For those of you that think the Summit League and/or Horizon League would take us back, you are mistaken. It would have to be something like the OVC, as the schools left in both prior conferences, are loving the fact that we've been a middling team, since our move to the MVC.
Serious question on transfers. It used to be hard to transfer enough credits to graduate at another institution, since they wanted a certain amount of credits taken from school. With these kids basically moving around on year-to-year contracts moving forward, have universities made it much easier for credits to transfer, and for you to obtain a degree, just because you are an athlete on NIL?
