Jim LeCrone and the Horizon
Jun 28, 2017 6:24:38 GMT -5
motorcitysam, ptctitan, and 1 more like this
Post by Commissioner on Jun 28, 2017 6:24:38 GMT -5
This is a long, long essay I wrote yesterday during a six hour airport layover, when I didn't feel like working.
Jim LeCrone and the Horizon
After nine years as an assistant commissioner in the ACC, thirty-eight year old Jonathan LaCrone became Midwestern Collegiate Conference Commissioner on May 11, 1992. At that time, the league consisted of 8 teams: Butler, Dayton, Detroit, Duquesne, Evansville, La Salle, Loyola, and Xavier. Marquette and St. Louis had left the MCC prior to the 1991-92 season to join the new Great Midwest Conference (forerunner of Conference USA), and the league played with just 6 teams in 1992, with Evansville winning both the regular season and tournament titles for an NCAA bid, and third place Butler going to the NIT. But in December, 1991, La Salle (from the MAAC) and Duquesne (from the A10) had accepted invitations to join the league effective with the 1992-93 season. The conference also included Notre Dame as a member for all sports except football and basketball. The conference was hoping to expand further, with Bradley, Creighton, and Drake being considered (the MVC was in war between its football and non-football schools). Looking east, the conference had it's eye on St. Joe's of the A10. The goal, according to outgoing Commissioner Tucker DeEdwardo and several conference ADs, was to get to 12 teams, with an eastern and western division. All private. The conference averaged 6899 in home attendance.
On December 8, 1992, Dayton announced that it would leave the MCC to join the Great Midwest. That announcement began the destruction of the MCC. Dayton’s departure put the MCC in crisis mode, because the NCAA in those days required a conference to have at least 6 schools playing together for at least 5 years to have automatic NCAA tournament bids. That would have meant four years without an automatic bid. And although the conference had received multiple bids in the 1989 and 1990 seasons (and would again in the 1993 season then underway), it didn’t feel strong enough to be assured that its teams would get at-large bids without the auto bid. And in fact the league would not receive an automatic bid in 1994 (ironically, for Titan fans, the year Detroit finally won the tournament), with regular season champ Xavier (21-6) being relegated to the NIT along with second place Evansville.
Schools began scrambling. Duquesne had left the A10 for the MCC largely at the urging of Dayton’s administration. With Dayton more or less betraying them, the Dukes scurried back to the A10, finalizing those plans within two months of Dayton’s announcement. With Duquesne’s exit, many believed, as one newspaper headline put it, that the MCC was “doomed to extinction.” Another noted that the MCC was “on the verge of dissolving.” Butler and Evansville sought membership in the Missouri Valley (to its ever-lasting regret, the MVC chose Evansville, which at the time had better attendance and was winning more games), with the latter announcing in November 1993 that it would join the MVC after the 1993-94 season). Xavier and La Salle both refused to commit to remaining in the MCC beyond the 1993-94 season. Xavier began negotiating with the Atlantic 10, and by March of 1994 accepted an invite, although they wouldn’t officially join until after the 1995 season. La Salle also began exploring the A10, and the move was announced on January 23, 1995.
Whether DiEdwardo or someone else other than LeCrone could have kept Dayton from leaving is doubtful. In any event, once that happened, everyone was scrambling. But the crisis led to what was undoubtedly LeCrone’s finest hour as MCC/Horizon Commissioner. On December 9, 1993, the Horizon announced the largest single conference expansion ever. Essentially, the Horizon absorbed the top 5 finishers in the 1993 Mid-Continent Conference standings– Cleveland State, Northern Illinois, Wright State, UIC, and Green Bay, plus Milwaukee, which had just joined the Mid-Con after winning 23 games as an independent in 1993.
It was a brilliant move. Only by the mass introduction of a body of teams that had played together could the Midwestern keep its auto bid. And where else could the MCC have gone to do that? The Midwestern Collegiate restored its automatic bid in what was the only way possible, remained reasonably strong, and almost destroyed its budding rival, the other MCC. Although it was not enough to stave off the defections of Xavier and La Salle to the A10 (nor that of Notre Dame, which dropped its affiliate membership after the 1995 season), it is fair to say that LeCrone managed to save the league. But in doing so, it dramatically changed the league. Always a league of private, mainly Catholic, schools, the Midwestern suddenly became a majority-public school league. The new additions were also much larger and less academically selective than MCC teams had always been. Butler, Detroit, and Loyola were suddenly outliers. Furthermore, it might be noted that LeCrone’s move was reactive, not proactive. It wasn’t like he had any choice—reaction was the only course open. But looking at nearly 25 years since, reactive consistently seems to be the modus operandi of the Conference.
It’s now nearly 24 years since LeCrone pulled off that coup. Since then, the Horizon has done some other interesting things. In 2001, the name was changed to Horizon, which at the time sounded hokey but increasingly has become the way conferences go when picking names. The rebranding was handled quite well, though it's not clear it mattered. After the 2002 season, when 6th place UIC won the conference tournament, the league adopted the double bye format that heavily favored the regular season champion in the tournament. The format was praised by many as the ideal one for a mid-major, helping to guarantee the conference sent its best team to the NCAA dance. Whether it ever actually helped the Horizon we can’t know. In 2003 second place Milwaukee won the tournament, but champ Butler got an at-large bid anyway. In 2004 Milwaukee won the title but lost to UIC in the tournament, and was relegated to the NIT. In 2009 third place Cleveland State upended Butler in the tourney final, but both teams went to the NCAA. Other years the regular season champ won the tournament. Since it’s quite probable that Butler’s 2008 and 2010 teams would have received at-large bids even had they lost in the conference tournament, the big advantage given Butler as regular season champ might have even hurt the conference those two seasons--a tournament upset would likely have led to two bids. Anyway, few others ever adopted the format, and maybe that says something.
For a season or two around 2011 the Horizon League television network made Horizon fans the envy of most mid-major conference fans, until ESPN3 took over streaming almost every D-I game. And of course there is Motor City Madness, which most fans around the league hate, but which may yet be a hit in the new Ceasar’s Arena.
Where the Horizon under LeCrone has clearly failed, though, is in long term planning. The new MCC played with 11 schools in 1995, then dropped to nine for a couple seasons when Xavier and La Salle completed their move to the A10. Northern Illinois left after the 1997 season to return to the MAC, a sensible move given their football commitment, leaving the league at 8 members.
There was some risk in being an 8 team league, since the NCAA at the time required 8 teams to retain an automatic bid, so any defection could have put the league back in the situation it was in in 1993. Nevertheless, the league stayed at eight for four seasons until, in 2001, it almost inexplicably added Youngstown State, a football school with no history of success in men’s D-I basketball, in a relatively small and unappealing market. Almost equally inexplicably, the Horizon turned down Marshall, which was aiming to move its football to Conference USA and everything else to the Horizon. In 2001, YSU averaged under 2800 in attendance; Marshall over 5900. YSU was coming off a successful 19-11 season, but that was only its third winning season in 16 years. Marshall, facing tougher competition, had been 18-9 in 2001, and had had 13 winning seasons in those 16 years. Marshall would also have inched the conference southward, something it is now trying to do without much luck. But it was YSU in, Marshall, out.
After that, the league sat complacently for years. It did add Valparaiso for the 2008 season, not a bad move as the Crusaders had become one of the strongest Mid-Continent League programs, but not an earth-shattering endeavor. (Valpo had been passed over in the 1993 absorption of Mid-Con teams. At that time, the Crusaders had had 16 consecutive losing seasons.) Yet even with little action by the league, the Horizon rose in prestige, mainly riding along in the wake of the Butler Bulldogs. Beginning with the hiring of Barry Collier in 1989, the Dogs had embarked on an ambitious program of building their athletic (and of course especially men’s basketball) teams. After Xavier’s departure in 1995, Butler and Detroit battled for dominance in the conference for several years, with the Titans eventually fading while Butler soared. Under a series of outstanding coaches that followed Collier—Thad Matta, Todd Licklighter, and especially Brad Stevens, the Bulldogs became a national power and reached back-to-back Final Fours in 2010 and 2011. Milwaukee, under Bruce Pearl, also enjoyed NCAA success, and by the end of the first decade of the 20th century the Horizon could boast of a conference RPI ranking typically just outside the Top 10; a stellar NCAA Tournament Winning record, Butler’s Final Four appearances, a two NCAA tourney bids in 2003, 2007 and 2009.
Whether the Horizon made any efforts to use this strong position to strengthen its lineup, I don’t know, but if it did, it never broke into the news and certainly nothing came of it. That would have been the time to make a pitch for strong programs such as Evansville, Murray State, and Belmont, that the Horizon has tried to lure without success in the wake of Butler’s departure. From all outward appearances, however, the Horizon sat pat, apparently presuming that the attention the league lavished on Butler would be enough to keep the Bulldogs in the fold, and that so long as Butler was around, the league would just keep moving up.
Three teams have now departed the Horizon in the past six years – Butler, Loyola, and Valparaiso. Butler was of course the league’s dominant program; Valpo was the league’s dominant program in men’s basketball (the sport that matters) after Butler’s departure. Loyola had been a poorly run, poorly performing program, but it was the program with the most history and after Butler’s departure, perhaps the most potential to be a major national player again. It also represented the Horizon’s link to the people and talent-rich Chicago market. It is one of the favorites this year coming year in the MVC, and seems to be on the cusp of realizing all that potential.
Oakland and Northern Kentucky replaced Butler and Loyola. Now IUPUI will replace Valparaiso. Though the first two have performed well in their short Horizon tenure—with Oakland last year’s regular season champ and NKU the tournament champ—the Horizon is nonetheless a weaker conference. IUPUI doesn’t have to be a basket case. They’ve got enrollment and money, and under Ron Hunter had 10 consecutive seasons at .500 or better from 2002 through 2011, including one NCAA appearance and other seasons with 26 and 25 wins. But they’ve been the definition of mediocrity since Hunter left after the 2011 season, and the student body and people of Indianapolis are apathetic. They haven’t devoted much money to men’s basketball or athletics generally.
OK, so what is the point of this long recap? When I started writing it, I thought it would be more damning of LeCrone’s tenure than it is. There are two main failures. The first was to prevent Dayton’s departure in the first place. But it’s not clear that anybody could have done that. And once that happened, the loss of Duquesne, Xavier, and La Salle was probably inevitable. LeCrone resoonded by saving the league—and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration—by merging in 1994 with the top of the Mid-Continent, while retaining the Midwestern Collegiate brand. LeCrone’s main failing since—and it is considerable, although it is also not clear from here how much the fault really is his—was not seeking out and landing a couple of stronger programs in the 2007-2011 period, when the league was best positioned to do so.
Down below I’ve listed two readily available measures of success, conference RPI and home attendance, for the LeCrone years. Only in the last 3 seasons has RPI really fallen. In 2005, when Milwaukee reached the Sweet 16, the league was 19th in RPI, a number we haven’t dropped to even in these post-Butler years. Still, the league probably has only 1 or possibly two more years to get it back into the top 15 before our image is cemented as a lower mid-major conference, more then equal of the Summit and OVC (conferences we want to raid) than their better.
On the attendance side, attendance dropped tremendously in LeCrone’s early years as high drawing Dayton, Xavier, and Evansville left the conference. After that, however, the numbers held up pretty well, although there is some illusion here—average home attendance in the NCAA went from 3998 in 1996 (the first year post-Xavier) to 5004 in 2011 (Butler’s last year), but HL attendance slightly declined. On the other hand, most of that NCAA-wide increase was concentrated in the high-major conferences, which kept building bigger arenas. Mid-majors have suffered declining attendance for a long time. The MAC, for example, went from 4009 in 1996 to 2907 in 2011. Accordingly, the Horizon retained or even marginally improved its ranking among conferences. Average attendance has taken another sharp drop since Butler left, and likely will again as IUPUI, a team which struggles to draw 1000 per game, replaces Valpo, one of the best drawing teams at home and a better draw on the road.
Finally, it’s worth noting that the Horizon isn’t alone in its troubles. Remember, the reason the MVC has twice raided the Horizon in this decade is because the MVC itself lost it’s two premier programs—Creighton and Wichita. Tulsa, another of that conference’s better programs when LeCrone joined the Horizon, is also long gone. The Colonial, a good mid-major conference similar to the Horizon in the early part of this century, lost its marquee programs of Virginia Commonwealth, Old Dominion, and George Mason. The WAC was a major player when LeCrone was named MCC Commissioner. Today, something called the WAC still exists, but it is nothing like the conference that included Utah, Brigham Young, New Mexico etc. Conference USA, formed out of the short-lived Great Midwest, which is the conference that essentially destroyed the MCC of the 1980s by taking St. Louis, Marquette, and then Dayton (while also crushing the MCC’s efforts to move up by adding DePaul and Notre Dame), is also a shadow of its former self, ranking several spots behind the Horizon in Conference RPI last year.
Some mid-major conferences have avoided losing their top teams, but that seems to be more a coincidence than a result of better operations or planning. The WCC has kept Gonzaga and St. Mary’s, and even added BYU. But there is really no place else for these non-football schools (except football indy BYU) to go. The PAC 12, and the Mountain West, require football. The WCC is better than the other regional hoops conferences, such as the Big West and Big Sky. The MAC has remained remarkably stable, but in addition to tremendous homogeneity among conference members, most of its members would have no other realistic place to park their football teams. And the MAC’s efforts to use football to expand—to add Central Florida, Temple, Massachusetts—have been largely unsuccessful.
One of the few mid-major conferences to really show some foresight is, oddly enough, the Summit, which correctly surmised that the Dakota schools, as state flagship universities and literally the only sports game in town, could power the conference forward. Or was that pure luck, because they had no place else to go. The Summit, after all, is going to lose another team today to the Horizon.
So how do I sum up this long, meandering essay? Conference commissioners get beat up because most mid-major fans dream of becoming high major. A few schools have done it over the past quarter century—Gonzaga, Butler, Xavier, Creighton, Wichita State—but they are the exception, and when they do it they tend to leave their old mid-major conferences. The fans of schools left behind tend to blame the conference, and that means blaming the Commissioner. But Jim LeCrone isn’t going to revitalize Detroit or Milwaukee or Cleveland State basketball. It’s getting harder and harder for mid-majors in college hoops, but if the Horizon wants to move forward, it’s really up to the schools, not the Commissioner, to make that happen.
MCC/Horizon Season RPI ranking (1992-93-Sports Reference SRS; 1994-1999 CBS Sport RPI; 2000- NCAA RPI
1992 – 10 (Last pre-LeCrone season)
1993 – 14
1994 - 12
1995 – 19 (first year after the big merge)
1996 – 14 (Xavier & La Salle gone)
1997 - 14
1998 - 9 (Northern Illinois leaves)
1999 – 15
2000 – 16
2001 - 11
2002 – 17 (YSU joins)
2003 – 13
2004 – 15
2005 – 19
2006 – 15
2007 – 10
2008 – 11 (Valpo joins)
2009 - 13
2010 - 10
2011 - 12
2012 – 13 (Butler leaves)
2013- 12
2014 – 14 (Loyola leaves, Oakland joins)
2015 – 17
2016 - 18
2017 – 18
MCC/Horizon Average Home Attendance and conference rank:
1992 – 6899 (10) (Last pre-LeCrone year)
1993 – 6429 (10) (LeCrone first year)
1994 – 5586 (11)
1995 – 4365 (16) (Big Merge)
1996 - 3625 (16) )Xavier and La Salle leave)
1997 – 3646 (14)
1998 – 3242 (14) (Northern Illinois leaves)
1999 – 3989 (11)
2000 - 3510 (15)
2001 – 3591 (14)
2002 - 3538 (13)
2003 – 3643 (13)
2004 – 3701 (14)
2005 – 3556 (14)
2006 – 3477 (14)
2007 – 3690 (13)
2008 – 3580 (13) (Valpo joins)
2009 – 3483 (13)
2010 – 3416 (13)
2011 – 3541 (13)
2012 – 3527 (14) (Butler leaves)
2013 – 2725 (16)
2014 – 2900 (13) (Loyola leaves, Oakland joins)
2015 – 2854 (14)
2016 – 2987 (13)
2017 – 2618
Jim LeCrone and the Horizon
After nine years as an assistant commissioner in the ACC, thirty-eight year old Jonathan LaCrone became Midwestern Collegiate Conference Commissioner on May 11, 1992. At that time, the league consisted of 8 teams: Butler, Dayton, Detroit, Duquesne, Evansville, La Salle, Loyola, and Xavier. Marquette and St. Louis had left the MCC prior to the 1991-92 season to join the new Great Midwest Conference (forerunner of Conference USA), and the league played with just 6 teams in 1992, with Evansville winning both the regular season and tournament titles for an NCAA bid, and third place Butler going to the NIT. But in December, 1991, La Salle (from the MAAC) and Duquesne (from the A10) had accepted invitations to join the league effective with the 1992-93 season. The conference also included Notre Dame as a member for all sports except football and basketball. The conference was hoping to expand further, with Bradley, Creighton, and Drake being considered (the MVC was in war between its football and non-football schools). Looking east, the conference had it's eye on St. Joe's of the A10. The goal, according to outgoing Commissioner Tucker DeEdwardo and several conference ADs, was to get to 12 teams, with an eastern and western division. All private. The conference averaged 6899 in home attendance.
On December 8, 1992, Dayton announced that it would leave the MCC to join the Great Midwest. That announcement began the destruction of the MCC. Dayton’s departure put the MCC in crisis mode, because the NCAA in those days required a conference to have at least 6 schools playing together for at least 5 years to have automatic NCAA tournament bids. That would have meant four years without an automatic bid. And although the conference had received multiple bids in the 1989 and 1990 seasons (and would again in the 1993 season then underway), it didn’t feel strong enough to be assured that its teams would get at-large bids without the auto bid. And in fact the league would not receive an automatic bid in 1994 (ironically, for Titan fans, the year Detroit finally won the tournament), with regular season champ Xavier (21-6) being relegated to the NIT along with second place Evansville.
Schools began scrambling. Duquesne had left the A10 for the MCC largely at the urging of Dayton’s administration. With Dayton more or less betraying them, the Dukes scurried back to the A10, finalizing those plans within two months of Dayton’s announcement. With Duquesne’s exit, many believed, as one newspaper headline put it, that the MCC was “doomed to extinction.” Another noted that the MCC was “on the verge of dissolving.” Butler and Evansville sought membership in the Missouri Valley (to its ever-lasting regret, the MVC chose Evansville, which at the time had better attendance and was winning more games), with the latter announcing in November 1993 that it would join the MVC after the 1993-94 season). Xavier and La Salle both refused to commit to remaining in the MCC beyond the 1993-94 season. Xavier began negotiating with the Atlantic 10, and by March of 1994 accepted an invite, although they wouldn’t officially join until after the 1995 season. La Salle also began exploring the A10, and the move was announced on January 23, 1995.
Whether DiEdwardo or someone else other than LeCrone could have kept Dayton from leaving is doubtful. In any event, once that happened, everyone was scrambling. But the crisis led to what was undoubtedly LeCrone’s finest hour as MCC/Horizon Commissioner. On December 9, 1993, the Horizon announced the largest single conference expansion ever. Essentially, the Horizon absorbed the top 5 finishers in the 1993 Mid-Continent Conference standings– Cleveland State, Northern Illinois, Wright State, UIC, and Green Bay, plus Milwaukee, which had just joined the Mid-Con after winning 23 games as an independent in 1993.
It was a brilliant move. Only by the mass introduction of a body of teams that had played together could the Midwestern keep its auto bid. And where else could the MCC have gone to do that? The Midwestern Collegiate restored its automatic bid in what was the only way possible, remained reasonably strong, and almost destroyed its budding rival, the other MCC. Although it was not enough to stave off the defections of Xavier and La Salle to the A10 (nor that of Notre Dame, which dropped its affiliate membership after the 1995 season), it is fair to say that LeCrone managed to save the league. But in doing so, it dramatically changed the league. Always a league of private, mainly Catholic, schools, the Midwestern suddenly became a majority-public school league. The new additions were also much larger and less academically selective than MCC teams had always been. Butler, Detroit, and Loyola were suddenly outliers. Furthermore, it might be noted that LeCrone’s move was reactive, not proactive. It wasn’t like he had any choice—reaction was the only course open. But looking at nearly 25 years since, reactive consistently seems to be the modus operandi of the Conference.
It’s now nearly 24 years since LeCrone pulled off that coup. Since then, the Horizon has done some other interesting things. In 2001, the name was changed to Horizon, which at the time sounded hokey but increasingly has become the way conferences go when picking names. The rebranding was handled quite well, though it's not clear it mattered. After the 2002 season, when 6th place UIC won the conference tournament, the league adopted the double bye format that heavily favored the regular season champion in the tournament. The format was praised by many as the ideal one for a mid-major, helping to guarantee the conference sent its best team to the NCAA dance. Whether it ever actually helped the Horizon we can’t know. In 2003 second place Milwaukee won the tournament, but champ Butler got an at-large bid anyway. In 2004 Milwaukee won the title but lost to UIC in the tournament, and was relegated to the NIT. In 2009 third place Cleveland State upended Butler in the tourney final, but both teams went to the NCAA. Other years the regular season champ won the tournament. Since it’s quite probable that Butler’s 2008 and 2010 teams would have received at-large bids even had they lost in the conference tournament, the big advantage given Butler as regular season champ might have even hurt the conference those two seasons--a tournament upset would likely have led to two bids. Anyway, few others ever adopted the format, and maybe that says something.
For a season or two around 2011 the Horizon League television network made Horizon fans the envy of most mid-major conference fans, until ESPN3 took over streaming almost every D-I game. And of course there is Motor City Madness, which most fans around the league hate, but which may yet be a hit in the new Ceasar’s Arena.
Where the Horizon under LeCrone has clearly failed, though, is in long term planning. The new MCC played with 11 schools in 1995, then dropped to nine for a couple seasons when Xavier and La Salle completed their move to the A10. Northern Illinois left after the 1997 season to return to the MAC, a sensible move given their football commitment, leaving the league at 8 members.
There was some risk in being an 8 team league, since the NCAA at the time required 8 teams to retain an automatic bid, so any defection could have put the league back in the situation it was in in 1993. Nevertheless, the league stayed at eight for four seasons until, in 2001, it almost inexplicably added Youngstown State, a football school with no history of success in men’s D-I basketball, in a relatively small and unappealing market. Almost equally inexplicably, the Horizon turned down Marshall, which was aiming to move its football to Conference USA and everything else to the Horizon. In 2001, YSU averaged under 2800 in attendance; Marshall over 5900. YSU was coming off a successful 19-11 season, but that was only its third winning season in 16 years. Marshall, facing tougher competition, had been 18-9 in 2001, and had had 13 winning seasons in those 16 years. Marshall would also have inched the conference southward, something it is now trying to do without much luck. But it was YSU in, Marshall, out.
After that, the league sat complacently for years. It did add Valparaiso for the 2008 season, not a bad move as the Crusaders had become one of the strongest Mid-Continent League programs, but not an earth-shattering endeavor. (Valpo had been passed over in the 1993 absorption of Mid-Con teams. At that time, the Crusaders had had 16 consecutive losing seasons.) Yet even with little action by the league, the Horizon rose in prestige, mainly riding along in the wake of the Butler Bulldogs. Beginning with the hiring of Barry Collier in 1989, the Dogs had embarked on an ambitious program of building their athletic (and of course especially men’s basketball) teams. After Xavier’s departure in 1995, Butler and Detroit battled for dominance in the conference for several years, with the Titans eventually fading while Butler soared. Under a series of outstanding coaches that followed Collier—Thad Matta, Todd Licklighter, and especially Brad Stevens, the Bulldogs became a national power and reached back-to-back Final Fours in 2010 and 2011. Milwaukee, under Bruce Pearl, also enjoyed NCAA success, and by the end of the first decade of the 20th century the Horizon could boast of a conference RPI ranking typically just outside the Top 10; a stellar NCAA Tournament Winning record, Butler’s Final Four appearances, a two NCAA tourney bids in 2003, 2007 and 2009.
Whether the Horizon made any efforts to use this strong position to strengthen its lineup, I don’t know, but if it did, it never broke into the news and certainly nothing came of it. That would have been the time to make a pitch for strong programs such as Evansville, Murray State, and Belmont, that the Horizon has tried to lure without success in the wake of Butler’s departure. From all outward appearances, however, the Horizon sat pat, apparently presuming that the attention the league lavished on Butler would be enough to keep the Bulldogs in the fold, and that so long as Butler was around, the league would just keep moving up.
Three teams have now departed the Horizon in the past six years – Butler, Loyola, and Valparaiso. Butler was of course the league’s dominant program; Valpo was the league’s dominant program in men’s basketball (the sport that matters) after Butler’s departure. Loyola had been a poorly run, poorly performing program, but it was the program with the most history and after Butler’s departure, perhaps the most potential to be a major national player again. It also represented the Horizon’s link to the people and talent-rich Chicago market. It is one of the favorites this year coming year in the MVC, and seems to be on the cusp of realizing all that potential.
Oakland and Northern Kentucky replaced Butler and Loyola. Now IUPUI will replace Valparaiso. Though the first two have performed well in their short Horizon tenure—with Oakland last year’s regular season champ and NKU the tournament champ—the Horizon is nonetheless a weaker conference. IUPUI doesn’t have to be a basket case. They’ve got enrollment and money, and under Ron Hunter had 10 consecutive seasons at .500 or better from 2002 through 2011, including one NCAA appearance and other seasons with 26 and 25 wins. But they’ve been the definition of mediocrity since Hunter left after the 2011 season, and the student body and people of Indianapolis are apathetic. They haven’t devoted much money to men’s basketball or athletics generally.
OK, so what is the point of this long recap? When I started writing it, I thought it would be more damning of LeCrone’s tenure than it is. There are two main failures. The first was to prevent Dayton’s departure in the first place. But it’s not clear that anybody could have done that. And once that happened, the loss of Duquesne, Xavier, and La Salle was probably inevitable. LeCrone resoonded by saving the league—and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration—by merging in 1994 with the top of the Mid-Continent, while retaining the Midwestern Collegiate brand. LeCrone’s main failing since—and it is considerable, although it is also not clear from here how much the fault really is his—was not seeking out and landing a couple of stronger programs in the 2007-2011 period, when the league was best positioned to do so.
Down below I’ve listed two readily available measures of success, conference RPI and home attendance, for the LeCrone years. Only in the last 3 seasons has RPI really fallen. In 2005, when Milwaukee reached the Sweet 16, the league was 19th in RPI, a number we haven’t dropped to even in these post-Butler years. Still, the league probably has only 1 or possibly two more years to get it back into the top 15 before our image is cemented as a lower mid-major conference, more then equal of the Summit and OVC (conferences we want to raid) than their better.
On the attendance side, attendance dropped tremendously in LeCrone’s early years as high drawing Dayton, Xavier, and Evansville left the conference. After that, however, the numbers held up pretty well, although there is some illusion here—average home attendance in the NCAA went from 3998 in 1996 (the first year post-Xavier) to 5004 in 2011 (Butler’s last year), but HL attendance slightly declined. On the other hand, most of that NCAA-wide increase was concentrated in the high-major conferences, which kept building bigger arenas. Mid-majors have suffered declining attendance for a long time. The MAC, for example, went from 4009 in 1996 to 2907 in 2011. Accordingly, the Horizon retained or even marginally improved its ranking among conferences. Average attendance has taken another sharp drop since Butler left, and likely will again as IUPUI, a team which struggles to draw 1000 per game, replaces Valpo, one of the best drawing teams at home and a better draw on the road.
Finally, it’s worth noting that the Horizon isn’t alone in its troubles. Remember, the reason the MVC has twice raided the Horizon in this decade is because the MVC itself lost it’s two premier programs—Creighton and Wichita. Tulsa, another of that conference’s better programs when LeCrone joined the Horizon, is also long gone. The Colonial, a good mid-major conference similar to the Horizon in the early part of this century, lost its marquee programs of Virginia Commonwealth, Old Dominion, and George Mason. The WAC was a major player when LeCrone was named MCC Commissioner. Today, something called the WAC still exists, but it is nothing like the conference that included Utah, Brigham Young, New Mexico etc. Conference USA, formed out of the short-lived Great Midwest, which is the conference that essentially destroyed the MCC of the 1980s by taking St. Louis, Marquette, and then Dayton (while also crushing the MCC’s efforts to move up by adding DePaul and Notre Dame), is also a shadow of its former self, ranking several spots behind the Horizon in Conference RPI last year.
Some mid-major conferences have avoided losing their top teams, but that seems to be more a coincidence than a result of better operations or planning. The WCC has kept Gonzaga and St. Mary’s, and even added BYU. But there is really no place else for these non-football schools (except football indy BYU) to go. The PAC 12, and the Mountain West, require football. The WCC is better than the other regional hoops conferences, such as the Big West and Big Sky. The MAC has remained remarkably stable, but in addition to tremendous homogeneity among conference members, most of its members would have no other realistic place to park their football teams. And the MAC’s efforts to use football to expand—to add Central Florida, Temple, Massachusetts—have been largely unsuccessful.
One of the few mid-major conferences to really show some foresight is, oddly enough, the Summit, which correctly surmised that the Dakota schools, as state flagship universities and literally the only sports game in town, could power the conference forward. Or was that pure luck, because they had no place else to go. The Summit, after all, is going to lose another team today to the Horizon.
So how do I sum up this long, meandering essay? Conference commissioners get beat up because most mid-major fans dream of becoming high major. A few schools have done it over the past quarter century—Gonzaga, Butler, Xavier, Creighton, Wichita State—but they are the exception, and when they do it they tend to leave their old mid-major conferences. The fans of schools left behind tend to blame the conference, and that means blaming the Commissioner. But Jim LeCrone isn’t going to revitalize Detroit or Milwaukee or Cleveland State basketball. It’s getting harder and harder for mid-majors in college hoops, but if the Horizon wants to move forward, it’s really up to the schools, not the Commissioner, to make that happen.
MCC/Horizon Season RPI ranking (1992-93-Sports Reference SRS; 1994-1999 CBS Sport RPI; 2000- NCAA RPI
1992 – 10 (Last pre-LeCrone season)
1993 – 14
1994 - 12
1995 – 19 (first year after the big merge)
1996 – 14 (Xavier & La Salle gone)
1997 - 14
1998 - 9 (Northern Illinois leaves)
1999 – 15
2000 – 16
2001 - 11
2002 – 17 (YSU joins)
2003 – 13
2004 – 15
2005 – 19
2006 – 15
2007 – 10
2008 – 11 (Valpo joins)
2009 - 13
2010 - 10
2011 - 12
2012 – 13 (Butler leaves)
2013- 12
2014 – 14 (Loyola leaves, Oakland joins)
2015 – 17
2016 - 18
2017 – 18
MCC/Horizon Average Home Attendance and conference rank:
1992 – 6899 (10) (Last pre-LeCrone year)
1993 – 6429 (10) (LeCrone first year)
1994 – 5586 (11)
1995 – 4365 (16) (Big Merge)
1996 - 3625 (16) )Xavier and La Salle leave)
1997 – 3646 (14)
1998 – 3242 (14) (Northern Illinois leaves)
1999 – 3989 (11)
2000 - 3510 (15)
2001 – 3591 (14)
2002 - 3538 (13)
2003 – 3643 (13)
2004 – 3701 (14)
2005 – 3556 (14)
2006 – 3477 (14)
2007 – 3690 (13)
2008 – 3580 (13) (Valpo joins)
2009 – 3483 (13)
2010 – 3416 (13)
2011 – 3541 (13)
2012 – 3527 (14) (Butler leaves)
2013 – 2725 (16)
2014 – 2900 (13) (Loyola leaves, Oakland joins)
2015 – 2854 (14)
2016 – 2987 (13)
2017 – 2618