Why is the Missouri Valley Conference refered to as a mid-major?

Answer 1

Mid-major
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mid-major is a term mainly used in American college basketball and, to a lesser extent, college football, to describe schools not affiliated with a Bowl Championship Series (BCS) conference. Though not always the case in the past, the term today has basically the same meaning in basketball that it has in football. Still, "mid-major schools" face different dilemmas in each sport.

There has been much debate, especially in the last decade, as to the true definition of the term "mid-major" as it relates to college basketball. Some still believe that the term has an arbitrary litmus test of sorts, such as how many teams a conference qualifies for the NCAA tournament in a "good" year, or how much success said conference has in the NCAA tournament, or even conference revenue, attendance, and so on. Factors such as these have been shown to be poor indicators, at best, in recent years as conferences such as the Missouri Valley and Horizon League have either a) received two, three, or four NCAA tournament bids every single year since the 1990's (MVC), or b) had a higher NCAA tournament winning % than all but one non-BCS conference over the last four years (Horizon League). The Horizon League is also one of only two non-BCS conferences that has had a Sweet 16 team in two of the last four NCAA tournaments, with C-USA being the other. Possibly even more telling, for 2005-06 the MVC had an average attendance of nearly 2,000 more people per game than the A-10, and outdrew C-USA by over 2,000 per game. NCAA D-1 attendance figures, 2005-2006

It is quite possible that the parity shown in this year's NCAA tournament is a reflection that, outside of being BCS members, higher-rated conferences can no longer be differentiated from each other with any clarity when it comes to the "mid-major" and "major" labels.