![]() īy the late 1960s, rising costs for football meant that basketball could no longer help subsidize football programs. Saint Louis University dropped football after the 1949 season. Washburn University competed in football from 1935 through 1940. Both schools returned to the MVC for non-football sports several years later (Bradley in 1955 and Drake in 1956), but Bradley never rejoined for football (dropping the sport in 1970), and Drake didn't rejoin in football until 1971. In 1951 Drake University and Bradley University left the Missouri Valley Conference as a result of the Johnny Bright incident, a racially motivated on-field attack against Drake's black star Johnny Bright by a white Oklahoma A&M player. The Missouri Valley Conference started sponsoring football in the fall of 1907. Locations of current Missouri Valley Football Conference member institutions.Houston's 1952 Missouri Valley Conference championship trophy The conferences will share the "Missouri Valley" name but will remain separate administratively. This change aligns the conference with the Missouri Valley Conference, a conference in which five of the nine Missouri Valley Football schools participate. On June 6, 2008, the Gateway Football Conference changed its name to the Missouri Valley Football Conference, effective immediately. On March 7, 2007, the conference announced that both schools would join the conference beginning with the 2008 season. However, Great West Football Conference members North Dakota State and South Dakota State were asked to submit information about themselves and to attend the conference presidents' meeting. ĭue to Western Kentucky's move, the Gateway was left with 7 members for the 2007 season. The Hilltoppers left the GFC after the 2006 season, went through the two-year "reclassification" period mandated by the NCAA for schools moving from the FCS to the FBS, and became a football member of its all-sports conference, the Sun Belt Conference, in 2009. On November 2, 2006, Western Kentucky's Board of Regents approved a proposal by the school's president to upgrade the football program to the Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS formerly Division I-A). The Gateway changed its name to the Missouri Valley Football Conference in 2008. Southwest Missouri State changed its name to Missouri State in 2005. After Eastern Illinois joined the Ohio Valley Conference for football in 1995, Youngstown State joined in 1997 and was followed by Western Kentucky in 2001. In 1992, when the Gateway Collegiate Athletic Conference merged with the MVC, the football conference kept the Gateway charter, with a minor name change to Gateway Football Conference. The football programs joined with the Gateway Collegiate Athletic Conference, which at the time was a women's athletic conference that roughly paralleled the MVC. At that time, the I-AA members from the MVC (Illinois State, Indiana State, and Southern Illinois) joined Eastern Illinois, Northern Iowa, Southwest Missouri State, and Western Illinois to form the Association of Mid-Continent Universities, later the Mid-Continent Conference and now The Summit League, for sports other than football. The conference was formed from the remnant football schools of the old Missouri Valley when it stopped sponsoring its hybrid I-A/I-AA football league in 1985. The Missouri Valley Football Conference has a convoluted history.
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