Looks like the OVC will survive ... for now

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

For the past several weeks, the loud rumor in conference realignment land was that Southeast Missouri State (SEMO) and UT-Martin were all but certain to leave the Ohio Valley Conference for the United Athletic Conference. Fellow OVC member Little Rock departing in October did little to quell the speculation.

And this wasn’t just stuff from the message board community. I was hearing the exact same thing from athletic directors and multiple conference commissioners.

But the calendar turned to November with no press releases or official confirmations from either league. And then, last week, I started to hear from folks I trust that actually, those moves weren’t going to happen after all.

I wanted to get one last confirming note, but of course, before I could do that, SEMO tweeted it out:

The statement from SEMO AD Brady Barke references a “reinforced commitment from the remaining members,” which is very similar to the language other sources used with me last week. I’m told that, specifically, this means an increase in exit fee obligations to leave the OVC in the short term. Two industry sources told me that if a team were to leave the OVC in the immediate future, it would cost more than $2 million in exit fees.

Given the budgets of the UAC, Summit and other leagues sniffing around the OVC … that number is likely too rich for anyone’s blood at the moment.

So where does the OVC go from here? What does the Summit do after surprisingly losing Denver to the WCC last month? What else am I hearing from mid-major realignment land?

Before anybody else tweets out the story, here’s what I’ve got in my notebook: