MVCfans.com

As we start our 6th season of this site, today we begin to look ahead to the 2015-16 Missouri Valley Conference men's basketball season with our user vote to rank the MVC teams. We will work in reverse order, predicting the 10th place finisher this week and concluding with the predicted MVC champion chosen by our users between the last two teams remaining in week 9. Following the team rankings, we will vote on the individual awards and compare them to the media selections.

Here are previous MVCfans.com results (predicted / actual):
2010-11: Wichita State / Missouri State
2011-12: Creighton / Wichita State
2012-13: Creighton / Creighton
2013-14: Wichita State / Wichita State
2014-15: Wichita State / Wichita State

Week 1 - Who will finish in 10th place during the 2015-16 MVC men's basketball season?
-You are choosing the team that you believe will finish in last place for this regular season.
Poll open until the evening of Sunday, September 6.

Sad but I voted for my Bears for last place. I just don't see us finishing higher than 9th or 10th. Too many issues - no go to scorer, no size in the post (McCullough is out), porous defense, etc.

Looks like another year of living vicariously through the Shockers for me.

This one might be a battle.

The bottom could be a hot mess this year. It would appear that Bradley has the least in the cupboard, but I'm actually figuring on some of their new talent to start figuring things out by midway through conference season. MSU and SIU are smoldering dumpster fires at this point, but SIU still has an All-League caliber player in Beane and despite some folks' distaste for him, a serviceable coach on staff. MSU has neither of those things.

I'll take MSU in this spot. The 10th place finisher could have very, very few wins.

The Geno Ford firing "fallout" begins.

This is a tough call. Bradley has what would appear to be the worst team, but a new coach and new players - they can stand a slow start and the team can still have some hope. Neither the coach nor the players are accustomed to a pattern of losing. You can't say that for MSU, so I went with them for the bottom of the league.

MSU's next hire is looking at a huge rebuild. Hinson is a proven Valley coach and he's struggling with a rebuild at SIU. MSU is going to end up with an unproven assistant (who's willing to risk a career-ending gig at MSU) for their rebuild.

Some of us tried to warn MSU fans that hiring assistants on the cheap as HC was a crap shoot. MSU is now a prime example of the truth of that. Hire a winner and they leave. Hire a loser and they tank your program.

The bottom of the valley is going to be awful again, which is good news for the top dogs knowing they have 6–8 games a year where they barely need to show up to win.

Aargh wrote:This is a tough call. Bradley has what would appear to be the worst team, but a new coach and new players - they can stand a slow start and the team can still have some hope. Neither the coach nor the players are accustomed to a pattern of losing. You can't say that for MSU, so I went with them for the bottom of the league.

MSU's next hire is looking at a huge rebuild. Hinson is a proven Valley coach and he's struggling with a rebuild at SIU. MSU is going to end up with an unproven assistant (who's willing to risk a career-ending gig at MSU) for their rebuild.

Some of us tried to warn MSU fans that hiring assistants on the cheap as HC was a crap shoot. MSU is now a prime example of the truth of that. Hire a winner and they leave. Hire a loser and they tank your program.

Nobody ever said it would be easy. Beane should keep SIU out of the cellar. The Braves and Bears could finish tied for last place, but the Bears seem to have what it takes to finish last.

Red wrote:The bottom of the valley is going to be awful again, which is good news for the top dogs knowing they have 6–8 games a year where they barely need to show up to win.

Good news? Wins over awful opponents destroy the RPIs and SOSs of those "top dogs", not to mention that it actually hurts good teams later on if they don't receive any good competition throughout most of the year.

Your philosophy is great if you're just looking to pad wins.

Aargh wrote:This is a tough call. Bradley has what would appear to be the worst team, but a new coach and new players - they can stand a slow start and the team can still have some hope. Neither the coach nor the players are accustomed to a pattern of losing. You can't say that for MSU, so I went with them for the bottom of the league.

MSU's next hire is looking at a huge rebuild. Hinson is a proven Valley coach and he's struggling with a rebuild at SIU. MSU is going to end up with an unproven assistant (who's willing to risk a career-ending gig at MSU) for their rebuild.

Some of us tried to warn MSU fans that hiring assistants on the cheap as HC was a crap shoot. MSU is now a prime example of the truth of that. Hire a winner and they leave. Hire a loser and they tank your program.

I see what you are saying. Being a mid major with a finite budget is just tough. But based on my knowledge of MSU I do think we would shell out major bucks to a guy that builds a winner. Problem is we would want him to prove he can win first. By major bucks I mean Jacobsen type money and not Marshall type megabucks.

I don't think hiring an assistant is always a bad idea. True we had one that built a winner (Cuonzo) who then bolted for a higher profile job. And our current coach was also an assistant and is tanking our program. But that could happen even with a coach with HC experience. I think we overlooked the warning sign that Lusk did in fact have a year of HC experience on his resume and that year was not successful at all.