MVC Expansion Update – UIC

Is UIC on the Way?

(St. Louis, MO) – A twelve team, Missouri Valley Conference should become a reality next season. While Loyola Chicago is leaving for the Atlantic Ten, Ohio Valley Conference powers Belmont and Murray State will be new members. Now it seems certain that Illinois-Chicago will be joining very soon.

Mulitple media reports over the past months have linked the Horizon League member to the Valley. The Flames, UT-Arlington and Kansas City have filled the rumor-mill as the potential additions.

Valley officials made an early January visit to the UIC campus and one UIC source told me the interactions went well and UIC officials felt serious optimism about the potential move. That source told me and as we shared with Art Hains (@ArtHains) on 969 the Jock on January 18, UIC has the expectation of something happening as early as the end of January.

Now, national writers like Jon Rothstein, Matt Norlander and others have confirmed what we reported earlier this week.

The Valley would become a twelve-team basketball conference and league officials have already been speaking with coaches and athletic directors about the possible scheduling options for an eleven or twelve-team schedule. MVC teams currently play a true round-robin schedule but there is very little interest in Valley members to play 22 conference games.

The schedule will change. Will they go to true divisions (North & South) or just a divisional play schedule? That is the next critical structural decision as the decision to add UIC seems determined.

Why UIC?

Skepticism about the Flames’ program has caused some Valley fans to question this addition, but the positives far outweigh whatever negatives there are about the current UIC season’s accomplishments.

Many have questioned the advantage of having a conference team in the Chicago market. Even nationally ranked Loyola is receiving token media coverage from the Windy City’s media outlets. It has grown over the past four years of amazing success, but the Ramblers’ ‘beat writer’ is from LUC’s student newspaper and coverage from television and radio outlets is limited.

LUC trails the Bulls, the Hawks, the Bears, the Cubs, Northwestern and DePaul in terms of coverage. So why is the market important? One Valley administrator told me it is about alumni connections. Literally tens of thousands of alumni from other Valley institutions live in America’s ‘Second City’. The ability for those alumni to see their teams in Chicago and receive some Valley coverage there matters.

The ripple effect concerns more student recruitment back into those Valley schools. When Murray State joined the league, they noted that 90% of their students come from the Valley footprint. UIC fits squarely in that footprint and maintains many of those ties.

The Valley’s in-house television production team has contracts with NBC Chicago, so this addition continue’s the league’s ability to advertise into one of the nation’s largest cities.

What About Flames Basketball?

While UIC is just 7-9 this season after a nine-win campaign a year ago, they are a program that won 20 games as recently as 2019. They have to get better to compete in the nation’s (KenPom) eleventh ranked conference, but they appear to have a solid coaching staff assembled and are building in the right direction.

This season they defeated the Valley’s Valparaiso and lost to Loyola Chicago. After starting the season 2-and-6, they have gone 5-and-3 and have won three of their last four Horizon league games.

Coach Luke Yaklich is no stranger to Valley fans. As an Illinois State graduate, he assisted Dan Muller when the Redbirds shared the 2017 league title with Wichita State. He spent two seasons at Michigan helping John Beilein guide two Wolverine teams to the Sweet Sixteen. Yaklich then joined Shaka Smart’s Texas staff. His national reputation for building outstanding defensive schemes is well earned. During his two seasons with Beilein, Michigan finished eighth and second nationally in scoring defense. In his one season at Texas, the Longhorns allowed just 63.3 points per game.

This Flames’ Season

His staff’s star power comes from former University of Illinois National Player of the Year Dee Brown, but Yaklich’s staff includes former Horizon Star and Illinois State staffer Will Veasley and Chicago native and long-term assistant to Jim Christian, Bill Wuczynski. The staff has deep ties to the Chicago-land area.

Two of the Flames’ top two scorers are Chicago natives that transferred ‘home’ from other Division 1 schools. Damaria Franklin (Tennessee Tech) and Zion Griffin (Iowa State) are juniors and likely to return next season.

While Yaklich’s first team won just nine games, this team seems destined to improve on that and all ‘Yak’ as Muller called him, has been associated with is winning. He worked his way up from being a high school head coach to becoming a top assistant at two power conference schools and is building a program at UIC that now appears to be joining the MVC.

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