Some moves work out much better than others.

The contrasting fortunes of the Loyola Ramblers and the league they left behind, the Missouri Valley Conference, should give athletic directors pause as the Great Realignment continues in college sports.

Ramblers coach Porter Moser painstakingly built his program up from Horizon League doormat to MVC power and Final Four Cinderella.

Loyola won 99 games during Moser’s last four years. Sister Jean became one of the nation’s most famous boosters. Moser’s well-oiled program machinery kept producing talented and cohesive rosters.

The Ramblers seemed poised to keep producing 20-victory seasons as Wichita State and Creighton once did during their MVC heyday.

Ah, but status quo is fleeting in college basketball. After rejecting various pitches to leave Loyola, Moser finally moved on to a greater challenge at Oklahoma.

After Loyola promoted assistant coach Drew Valentine, the Ramblers spent one more successful season in the Valley, punched another ticket to the Big Dance, and then bailed for the Atlantic 10 conference.

Now, they are 6-11 overall and 0-5 in the A-10 going into Wednesday night’s home game with SLU. On Saturday, Loyola fell 86-55 at St. Joseph’s, which was winless in league play.

Meanwhile, the St. Louis-based MVC is flourishing without Loyola. It brought in Illinois Chicago to keep the Windy City market, and it added mid-major powers Murray State and Belmont from the Ohio Valley Conference.

The MVC hit a rough patch after losing Wichita State to the American Athletic Conference and Creighton to the Big East. But now, the Valley has a robust 12-team league with impressive competitive depth.

“A lot of programs are the same when it comes to resources,” Bradley coach Brian Wardle said during the MVC’s weekly Zoom conference. “Having been to Murray State and Belmont now, they’re going to be fine in our league, seeing what they have in budgets and resources. It’s going to be tough to see a team separate. I think you will see a big bundle in this league for a little bit.”

SIU Carbondale, Indiana State, Belmont, Bradley and Drake are all bidding for 20-plus victories. Three teams are 6-2 in league play and five are 5-3.

Arch Madness, at Enterprise Center March 2-5, should be crazy.

“There are no easy nights. We have to learn how to deal with that on a consistent basis,” Belmont coach Casey Alexander said Monday. “We did not have that in the OVC. We certainly had to show up and play well to win, but it was not quite the dogfight it is every time we play in the Valley.”

Loyola is missed, of course, but the league is moving upward and onward.

On the other hand, the Ramblers have hit a rut and left Valentine at wit’s end. He is one of college basketball’s rising coaching stars, but this team has not come together.

A 78-64 loss at home to VCU left Valentine exasperated. “We look like a team that has no idea what they’re doing,” he said in his postgame interview. “It’s really frustrating and disappointing when that happens.”

The Ramblers have struggled with turnovers on offense and excessive fouling on defense. Efforts to fix those issues in practice have failed. Shuffling the playing rotations hasn’t worked either.

“We have low emotion, low energy, low spirit,” Valentine said. “That’s got to change. I can’t beg for guys to have that every single day.”

The issues continued with the debacle at St. Joseph’s.

“Just unfortunate,” Valentine said in his postgame interview. “We have to do a better job of getting our team inspired to play.”

Moving forward, Valentine will face a difficult challenge pushing the Ramblers up the A-10 ladder. The league is down this season and yet Loyola still sits behind 14 other schools in the standings.

Programs like St. Bonaventure, Davidson, UMass (with Frank Martin at the helm) and George Mason (coached by Kim English) should improve and push A-10 powers Dayton, VCU, SLU and Richmond during seasons to come.

The Ramblers will face the same sort of gauntlet that has confronted Wichita State in the AAC as the Shockers moved on from successful-but-unhinged coach Gregg Marshall.

Back in the MVC, the league maintained its luster with some notable non-conference victories. Murray State beat Texas A&M when the Aggies were ranked 24th. Drake beat Mississippi State when the Bulldogs were No. 15, and SIU Carbondale won at Oklahoma State.

The league remains well-situated with good-sized college markets as well as Chicago, Nashville, Des Moines and Evansville plus the St. Louis hub.

Most of these schools have a strong basketball tradition, and most have enjoyed successful runs at some point in program history.

That collective heritage allows the MVC to remain one of the better mid-major conferences even as power conference schools swoop in to steal its top players.

And, yes, the Valley can survive losing coaches and entire programs to bigger conferences, too.