Home Teams Needing to Get Healthy

(St. Louis, MO) – This is a critical weekend for home team success in both the Missouri Valley and Ohio Valley Conferences. While everyone knows, ‘you have to dominate at home and break even on the road’, these are monumental home games during an important juncture of the season.

Missouri Valley Conference

The bottom four teams in the MVC are hosting games this weekend. If Northern Iowa, Indiana State, Evansville or Loyola are going to make anything of their seasons, their home games this weekend are essential.

Winless Northern Iowa and Indiana State host Drake and Bradley respectively. Losses in those games would drop those typically extremely competitive teams into the abyss of staring at playing in Thursday night games at Arch Madness 2017.

Drake head coach Jeff Rutter, says playing on the road is difficult, but the Bulldogs don’t change their approach just because they are in a hostile environment.

 

 

(video courtesy of godrakebulldogs.com)

Evansville (10-8, 1-4) and Loyola (12-6, 2-3) have won a lot of games, but have struggled in league play and their home tilts with Southern Illinois and Missouri State will not be easy, but are ‘must wins’.

The Ramblers have a legitimate shot at post season basketball if they can finish in the upper half to a third of the Valley race, so building some momentum from a well-played loss at Wichita State would be huge.

Finally, Illinois State’s (13-4, 5-0) home show down with Wichita State (15-3, 5-0) will determine the Redbirds’ trajectory for the rest of the season. A loss on Saturday would all but guarantee the Shockers their fourth straight MVC regular season title.

Ohio Valley Conference

The OVC’s story is practically a carbon copy of the one from the MVC. Four of the six teams with losing conference records are playing at on home on Saturday. Only Austin Peay (5-13, 1-3) is playing on the road. Only Tennessee Tech (7-12, 3-1) has a winning league record and is hosting a game Saturday.

Since the OVC invites just the top eight teams to Music City Madness, home conference games in January are gigantic. In the depleted West Division where four of the six teams are under .500, a home win is critical. As the West Division teams are battling for scraps from the East Division table, their  head-to-head match ups become even more weighty. Two of Saturday’s games are of particular interest.

Eastern Illinois (9-8, 1-3) hosts APSU in a do or die contest, as is UT Martin’s (11-8, 1-3) chance to knock off surprising Southeast Missouri (7-12, 2-2). Holding serve for those two teams throws them right back in to the play off mix.

The best OVC Saturday match up finds revived Jacksonville State (11-8, 3-1) visiting the Golden Eagles of Tennessee Tech. The winner of that game stands no worse than in a two-way tie for second place and one game out of first in powerful East Division.

Do Good