Todd Golden: TODD AARON Re-defining Thursday and the new reality of Arch Madness

Sep. 27—What are the seven words that serve as nightmare fuel for basketball fans of Missouri Valley Conference schools?

"You're playing on Thursday at Arch Madness."

It's not an exaggeration to say that a few generations of MVC fans have come of age with the idea that the minimum standard for a successful conference season was avoiding the play-in games of the MVC Tournament.

Since 1991, when the MVC moved the tournament to St. Louis, the format has been remained largely unchanged. The bottom four finishers wore the dunce cap and participated in the undercard play-in games before the "real" MVC contenders joined in the following day for a full basketball feast.

That's how it was, and given that the MVC was reluctant to expand beyond 10 schools? That's the way it appeared it would stay forever. It appeared to be a twain that would never meet.

However, hold on to whatever gives you comfort, because MVC fans are going to have to change their long-held perception that playing on Thursday is an embarrassing emasculation of their favorite program.

Or? Just as likely? Coaches and schools are going to have to get used to the fact that fans won't adjust their long-held belief that Thursday-in-St. Louis is tantamount to failure. It could be that the perceptual bar that must be cleared to judge MVC success just went up a notch in the eyes of those who pay the freight.

"I wonder how much fans know?" Valparaiso coach Matt Lottich said at MVC Media Day on Sept. 20. "It's going to be different for all of us."

With Belmont, Illinois-Chicago and Murray State coming into the MVC fold for the 2022-23 season, the MVC now has 12 teams. The twain did indeed meet.

With all 12 teams participating in the MVC Tournament, it obviously created the need for two more games. So Thursday At Arch Madness, once the province of the MVC dregs, will now include two-thirds of the conference membership, up from 40% in the previous format.

Like Friday, the four-game basketball feast that all MVC fans looked forward to for time immemorial it seemed, Thursday will also now be a four-game day. Obviously, that means higher-seeded teams will be participating, notably, the No. 5 and No. 6 seeds that used to skip out on Thursday.

This may all seem like a bit of pedantic thing to point out. OK, so Arch Madness is different. Big deal.

Think about it, though. When a MVC team has finished in the top six? Unless they were a preseason conference favorite or a perennial 20-win team, whether they want to admit it or not, fans of most MVC schools would at least breathe a sigh of relief to avoid Thursday.

Plus? When you knew your school was starting on Friday? It was much easier (and cheaper) to decide to make a weekend of it, particularly if your team played in the late Friday session.

The competitive part of it was written in stone too. Bizarrely, and unlike almost every other conference tournament — they all have some version of a play-in — the tournament played out for MVC play-in teams about as chalk as you could possibly imagine chalk could be. From 1999-2019, none of the MVC play-in teams advanced to the semifinals. To be in the play-in was a lead pipe cinch that your stay in St. Louis wasn't going to survive Friday.

So avoidance of the play-in was paramount. Now? The majority of the teams in the conference will have to win four games in four days to earn the golden ticket that comes from the NCAA Tournament auto-bid that goes to the tournament winner. That greatly increases the odds for a minority of the conference schools, albeit, the ones who earned the right to have that advantage.

For teams in the middle of the pack? And let's be honest, few teams are in the middle as often as Indiana State has been historically, avoiding the play-in created a sort of mediocre, end-of-season buzz. I recall making a big deal out of ISU's "great escape" in 2018 when it won at Bradley in the final conference game of the season to beat 16-to-1 odds to avoid the play-in.

That was fun. It generated some juice for an ISU team that was 8-10 in conference play and that ultimately got drop-kicked out of Arch Madness anyway. Now? A team like that might fade into apathetic irrelevance.

Teams will be consigned to Thursday in St. Louis much earlier than they were previously. Some of those late-season games that had some jeopardy attached to them — mediocre jeopardy, but jeopardy nonetheless! — will be dead rubbers. There might even be lower-tier MVC teams that rest players late, possibly, in multiple games. You tended to see that in occasional MVC regular season finales (Valparaiso did it in a game at Hulman Center in 2020), but now it might become more widespread.

Another thing to consider is that fans don't just adjust on a dime. For over 30 years, fans have used avoidance of Thursday as the absolute minimum barometer of a decent season. Now? It's much harder to avoid Thursday, but that doesn't mean fans are necessarily going to pivot to be more forgiving.

More importantly? Schools might not be either in certain situations.

There are more than a few MVC coaches over the years who kept their jobs based on avoidance of Thursday in St. Louis. In a fair world? Fans, donors and administrators would simply translate the old avoidance of Thursday into finishing top-half in the league or some other similar yardstick, but old ways die hard. The pressure on the coaches to finish top four instead of top six isn't an insignificant thing.

"If you're in a situation where you've been coaching for a certain amount of years and you don't finish top four? That's where it really matters," Missouri State coach Dana Ford said. "Once you start talking about job security? That's when those things [finishing top four] really matter."

MVC commissioner Jeff Jackson acknowledged that fans won't necessarily adjust to the new Arch Madness way right away, but he's confident that they will in time.

"I think the first year or two? The theory that the tournament starts on Friday? I think they'll start to recognize that this tournament starts on Thursday because of the quality of teams that are playing on Thursday. Now you have teams that finished in the first division [top half] playing on Thursday. I think that's going to change how people perceive it," Jackson said.

Jackson is confident that the tournament will grow into a full four-day event embraced by fans.

"I think [Thursday] will be a great day. You'll have more of a fan presence and probably on Wednesday as fans get into town. With the depth we have in this conference, the fifth or sixth-seeded team can win our tournament, so it creates a dynamic that's going to be really positive, exciting, and one that means you get to see more good basketball," Jackson said.

I hope Jackson is right and don't get me wrong. Pointing out that a bigger Arch Madness has a ripple effect on the regular season doesn't mean I don't like a bigger Arch Madness. Who doesn't like more basketball?

It's just that fans are going to have to re-calibrate how they perceive their schools perform with the new way of doing things. Or? Fans won't adjust and schools will have to adjust to how their fans will perceive them.

Pop the popcorn to see how it all plays out. Just have it ready for Thursday.

Todd Golden is sports editor of the Tribune-Star. He can be reached at (812) 231-4272 or todd.golden@tribstar.com. Follow Golden on Twitter at @TribStarTodd.