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If you had to pick our four top players heading into the season based on what you know today, who would they be?

I'm going around asking this on every Valley team forum and then plan on putting those 40 players into our Power Rankings software at MVCTalk and letting people rank the MVC Top 40. Figured it would be something cool to do and something with input from the fan bases of the entire league.

Others may disagree, but for now, I would say Milton Doyle, Clayton Custer (6'1 point guard transfer from Iowa State), Ben Richardson (6'3 junior guard), and Donte Ingram (6'6" junior guard/forward).

Awesome Svoboda, love to see something like this. It's really tough to say because we have a lot of new pieces that could end up surprising but it's hard to say who will break out.

I think JCT nailed it.

Doyle- added 10 pounds in the off season according to a recent news report and this is his first real fully healthy off season since arriving. I think he'll come back motivated to improve after an off year last season.

Custer- Maybe the player most crucial to the team having success. True point who can score and dish, I think he has potential to upgrade everyone else's game with his court vision/offensive game (also allows Doyle to play off ball).

Richardson- Probably our best defender. Led the Valley in 3pt % but only on 85 shots; will likely shoot at a higher clip now with Devon Turk gone. Hard nosed and good chemistry with Clayton due to being high school/AAU teammates

Ingram- Rock solid all the way around. He's a glue piece. Probably would be better at the 3 but is playing the 4 due to our annual height limitations. Explosive leaper.

Agree with those four.

Of course I must admi that I know little of the finer points of what makes a player good or bad BUT the obvious star is Milton--He has played hurt praxtically since he has been at LUC. With the added weight goes added strength, He should be the best we have this year. Ben and than Ingram and then Maybe Chastain.

Let us hope #5 is a BIG !!

Thanks for the responses thus far gentlemen. I'm going to give all of the team boards until next week sometime to finish providing submissions and then tally all of the players mentioned and put them into our power rankings app at MVCTalk for anyone registered there to rank the Top 40 as they see fit.

Here is a link to the master thread on MVCTalk that has links to the other 9 Valley team boards where I asked the question if you want to see who they're talking about in their Top 4 -- a little preseason reconnaissance: http://www.mvctalk.com/index.php?thread ... 3/#post-33

Here is the tally thus far.

Doyle IIII
Custer III
Richardson IIII
Ingram IIII
Chastain

Doyle
Custer
Richardson
Jackson

I think Chastain and Satterwhite have great potential, but are a year or two away.

Since the individual team voting has pretty much come to a crawl (or stopped) on all of the team forums, I went ahead and did a final tally this morning and created the Top 40 list. If you want to see the Top 40 as decided by each team board, click on the link below to see the list:

http://www.mvctalk.com/index.php?powerr ... -top-40.7/

For those of you that want to rank the Top 40, just log into your MVCTalk.com account, click on Power Rankings, select MVC Top 40 and then click on the red "Create Ranking" button. After you give your ranking a name, you'll see a red "Manage Ranking" button. Click that and then click on the "Create Power Ranking" link and go to town. You can just rank the Top 40 or you can add commentary, stats or other info about the players.

To see other user submitted MVC Top 40 rankings, you can click on the Authors link on the Power Rankings sub navigation bar and then select the MVC Top 40 from the "Switch Sport" selector or click the link below:

http://www.mvctalk.com/index.php?powerr ... sport_id=4

Thanks for everyone that took the time to submit their respective team's top 4 and hope everyone participates in creating a Top 40 ranking. Looking forward to the MVC season as always!