2024-25 Conference Previews: Missouri Valley

they're calling me Mr. Arch Madness after I hit the 25% off button in the McDonald's app

Hello! As laid out in the season preview for this newsletter, we’re changing up preview season a little. Previews will be released in alphabetical order, but somewhat differently than usual: one P5 a day, one two-bid(ish) conference a day, and one grab bag of one-bid leagues a day. One of each will be free for all to read. This one is a paid piece, and there’s a link to sign up below.

You can find all of these in the 2024-25 previews section of this website. On with the show.

Missouri Valley

Tier 1

1. Bradley

2. Northern Iowa

Tier 2

3. Murray State

4. Drake

Tier 3

5. Belmont

6. Southern Illinois

7. Illinois State

8. Illinois Chicago

Tier 4

9. Indiana State

10. Valparaiso

11. Evansville

12. Missouri State

My beautiful conference. They’ll never kill you, no matter how hard they try. The MVC lost 80 players to the transfer portal this offseason, or nearly seven per team. Now, that can happen from time to time when five of your 12 coaches are brand new, but even the seven teams that still have the same coach from 2023-24 lost an average of 4.6 players per team to the portal. It just kind of is what it is in this era of hoop: this is the incubator, and the high-majors across America are the vulture capitalists.

So, as always, I recommend watching as many MVC games as you can in a given season. It’s generally an offense-friendly conference, they run the best conference tournament in America, and you can almost always guarantee the winner being a frisky March team that opponents dread seeing in their bracket. Lest we forget 2022-23 Drake, who almost saved us from Final Four Miami. If only the DeVries family had a couple more buckets in ‘em.

beauty…grace…

I think there are two lead contenders to bring home the March throne this year, led by Bradley, who has the most underrated coach in America in Brian Wardle. Revisit the work I did in the offseason about coach under/overachieving and it makes no sense to me that Wardle seems to get zero buzz for larger jobs each offseason. Could he stand to garner an additional NCAA Tournament bid to help his case out? Sure. But across two jobs at Green Bay and Bradley, the 44-year-old has five of those schools’ combined 13 top 100 finishes they’ve ever had. He owns Green Bay’s two best seasons ever; he owns Bradley’s four best since 2007-08. Eventually, a smart AD will catch on.

Until then, you get a Bradley team that’s an odds-on favorite to finish top-100 again with the second-most returning production in the conference. In a topsy-turvy conference, no team had to do less work in the portal to build a winner. Three starters are back, headlined by potential conference POTYs Duke Deen (a 5’8” demon) and Darius Hannah (the Oso Ighodaro of the MVC). Pair that with 3-and-D man Christian Davis, who isn’t a great shooter but offers quality play on both ends, and you’ve got quite the base to work with.

It would be inaccurate to say Bradley added nothing from the portal, as I did like the pickup/rescue/return of Zek Montgomery from Rhode Island. Montgomery was a good, solid bench piece for Bradley in 2022-23 as a secondary ball handler. I thought he got cast out of position as a slasher type last year in Archie Miller’s awful scheme. A return to Bradley, where he has a career 3PT% of 40.2% on 112 attempts, should really help. Wardle even took an intriguing piece on D2 up-transfer Connor Dillon, an excellent scorer at Winona State who shot 54% 2PT/39% 3PT on very high volume. In lineups paired with Deen, he could be a terror…though as usual with these guys I have questions about the defense.

There are other returners here, and Wardle’s development record is very good, so you’ve got that, too. It’s going to be hard to move past the loss of Malevy Leons, who was simply so good both ways, but this is going to be another really good Bradley team. At some point, someone in the Big Ten or similar is going to see this and think “why not him?” Until then, enjoy him at Bradley while he’s there. Hopefully for a long time.

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