(Note: No, I do not usually write about sports here. If you’re a consistent reader, please bear with me on this one. News broke this morning that my alma mater, Missouri State University, is leaving its longtime home in the Missouri Valley Conference for Conference USA starting in 2025. I’ve been arguing against this move for a while now, and since it finally happened I wanted to get my thoughts out there in a timely fashion. Because of the “timeless fashion” part, I wanted to get this out as quickly as I could. All errors/typos therefore are mine. I beg pardon.) 

They’ve been your friends for a long time. You were happy when they got together and were a little teary at the wedding. But there was always the fleeting thought in the back of your mind that things moved a bit too fast. The problems started after a couple of years…you’d get messages from both of them separately about what the other did or didn’t do, and there were a couple of heated statements they made to each other in your presence that made you shift in your seat. So you weren’t that surprised when one day they asked you to meet them at a local coffee shop.You came prepared to hear about lawyers and moving plans, but instead they were all smiles. 

“We’re having a baby!”

Thus begins the tale of Missouri State announcing on Friday that they were leaving the Missouri Valley Conference and heading off to the greener pastures of Florida International and Delaware and New Mexico State (so honestly, the “greener pastures” are the entirety of the United States, but more on that later). MSU becomes a member of Conference USA in 2025. They become a full FBS school in football. The fanbase is, by all accounts, deliriously happy. 

Just like you would react to your longtime friends, I guess I’m weakly smiling in public. But when Clif Smart and the MSU fanbase announced their CUSA “baby” today, my reaction is that this is a colossal mistake. And it’s the sort of mistake that isn’t going to be fixed easily, if ever.

There are so many ways this can go wrong. Let’s start with the 900-pound helmeted gorilla in the room–football. Regardless of what anyone at MSU says, FBS (read: The Football You See On ESPN And The Networks) is the only reason this decision was made. FBS football has been MSU President Clif Smart’s white whale for some time now, which seems appropriate since football has been chained to the school’s ankle dragging it down like a literal whale. Smart is convinced beyond all reason that a program that hasn’t been relevant or drawn fans with any consistency will gain all of those things and more if they were just playing FBS football. Now, that may have meant something forty years ago, but it doesn’t any more. FBS football itself has virtually split into the two levels that D-1A and D-1AA used to be.

D-1A is the Big 10 and the SEC. D-1AA is everyone else.

If you’re a fan of the “everyone else” conference, you probably don’t like that very much. You’d like to think that your Big 12 or Pac-2 or ACC team is just as good and smart and liked as they were when you went to school there. In the words of Jules in Pulp Fiction, “See, I like that sh*t. But that ain’t the truth.” We are mere years and one television contract from the B10 and SEC breaking from the NCAA and starting their own Champions League of football, with no restrictions, no grade requirements, fully-paid athletes, and 20-24 teams each. EVERY OTHER SCHOOL IN THE COUNTRY not in this will be playing in a de facto second division. And while it’s a romantic thought to think that the fans will turn their noses up at the CFBCL in order to embrace what college sports used to be, well, that ain’t the truth. 

So, assuming that the CUSA move magically fixed every problem with MSU football, the best-case scenario is…second-division football. I have bad news for the MSU administration: you’re already in second-division football. 

But how about the problems that you’ve magically created on top of your football program that doesn’t win and doesn’t draw fans? You’re going to have to pay for enough new football scholarships to meet FBS demands, and MSU has already eliminated multiple men’s sports and started multiple women’s programs that exactly zero people watch to satisfy the Title IX gods (which may also be irrelevant soon but we’ll see), so if I were on the men’s soccer or golf team I’d be mighty nervous. Yes, you’re getting “bigger” football, but if you couldn’t draw fans to play Southern Illinois or North Dakota State (who might play better football than almost every team in CUSA already), what makes you think that you’re going to sell out games against >flips through cards< Florida International and Delaware?

The move always makes virtually every other sport that MSU has worse. CUSA is objectively, by every measure, a much worse conference for every other sport that MSU cares about. Men’s basketball, the actual “straw that stirs the drink” at MSU, moves from the 10th-best conference in the country to the 15th-best. Did you like watching the tire fire that Evansville was in basketball this year? Good news–CUSA has FOUR teams like that. Women’s basketball? Middle Tennessee State will stand in as the Drake replacement and were very good last year, but only three of ten teams finished above .500. Baseball? At best it’s a lateral move, and that’s solely because you’re getting back Dallas Baptist, a school that already left the MVC. (But let’s be honest: very few people care about baseball or else MSU wouldn’t be renting a cavernous baseball stadium for family and friends to watch them play) They do support bowling as a varsity sport, which might be something that Springfield as a pretty decent bowling town might enjoy. But you don’t make an entire conference change in the hope that Pete Weber shows up to increase your alcohol sales. 

I haven’t even gotten to logistics. The closest program to MSU is Louisiana Tech, which is about a seven-hour drive down Highway 65. Western Kentucky is about seven hours east. Everywhere else? Forget about it. Arch Madness? Nope, welcome to….Huntsville, Alabama. School administration claims that the change from bus travel to almost exclusively air travel will be “budget neutral”, which in the high-tech nomenclature of the college sports business is known as “a lie”. And now all of these sports enter the realm of NIL money so don’t be surprised when, on top of ticket and “mandatory donation” increases, some bro wearing jean shorts and slides with socks comes knocking on your door and asking for donations for the player pool. 

I love Missouri State. I have so many fond memories of school, of friends, and of sports. I would love to swing down more than I do right now to see what’s going on at the university. I very much hope I am wrong about all of this. But I don’t think I am.

In the end, this is President Smart’s day. On his way out the door and towards retirement, he got everything he wanted on his “to-do list” wrapped up in a big bow. MSU will be in FBS football. He gets to ride off into the sunset as the conquering hero. But, when he’s lounging at the poor in five years, the baby will be soiling its diaper and someone will need to clean up after it. At the moment when some real courage and leadership was needed to guide MSU sports in the opposite direction of the current in order to give it a future, Smart followed behind everyone else, only twenty years too late.