FARGO — The Missouri Valley Football Conference not only named a new commissioner on Monday, the league went a couple of steps farther in adding to its front office.
Jeff Jackson, the commissioner of the Missouri Valley Conference — the non-football entity of the league — will take over for long-time MVFC commissioner Patty Viverito on July 1. Jackson has been the Missouri Valley commissioner since 2021.
Moreover, the MVFC named Josh Fenton as executive advisor for the league, a move aimed at further allying the Summit League and MVFC. Fenton will remain as commissioner of the Summit, a job he’s had since 2023.
What it does is allow a single-sport league like the MVFC to take advantage of some of the operational resources of the Summit like marketing, branding, visibility and creative content.
“A lot of the things we’ve seen in other conferences in terms of promoting the brand,” said NDSU athletic director Matt Larsen. “So I think being able to leverage some of those resources across both leagues I think will help us.”
Four schools including North Dakota State are members of both the Summit and MVFC with the others being South Dakota State, South Dakota and North Dakota. Summit members Denver, Kansas City, Omaha and Oral Roberts do not field football programs while St. Thomas is a member of the Pioneer Football League, which previously had Viverito as a special assistant.
“This partnership will foster a mutually beneficial relationship between our two conferences, ensuring the continued success of the MVFC while establishing a stable framework for our membership,” Jackson said in a statement. “Our collective efforts will be instrumental in delivering an exceptional experience for our student-athletes.”
Valley football has seven schools that are members of other leagues for other sports: Illinois State, Murray State, Indiana State, Northern Iowa and Southern Illinois are members of the Missouri Valley and Youngstown State is a member of the Horizon League.
The MVFC also announced it will be adding a chief operating officer. The conference said in a press release the MVFC will remain an independent legal entity, distinct from its member institutions’ multisport conferences.
Prior to taking over the Valley, Jackson was executive associate commissioner of the Big 12 Conference for three years and as deputy commissioner of the Big South Conference for four years prior to that. He cut his cloth in athletics in men’s basketball, where he coached at various positions for 30 years including eight years as head coach at Furman and three years at New Hampshire. He is a 1984 graduate of Cornell University.
Vivrito is retiring after being the only commissioner the league has known. She was at the forefront when the Gateway Football Conference was formed in 1985 and later changed its name to the Missouri Valley Football Conference in 2008, the year NDSU and SDSU joined the league.
Missouri Valley Football Conference commissioner Jeff Jackson
Jeff would like to dispel the notion he was around when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, but he is on his third decade of reporting with Forum Communications. The son of a reporter and an English teacher, and the brother of a reporter, Jeff has worked at the Jamestown Sun, Bismarck Tribune and since 1990 The Forum, where he’s covered North Dakota State athletics since 1995.
Jeff has covered all nine of NDSU’s Division I FCS national football titles and has written three books: “Horns Up,” “North Dakota Tough” and “Covid Kids.” He is the radio host of “The Golf Show with Jeff Kolpack” April through August.