Tommies Go to D1

So the Tommies are going to the big-time, at least in athletics:

The University of St. Thomas is heading to Division I.

The university announced the NCAA's Division I Council approved a motion on Wednesday to allow St. Thomas to make the jump from Division III to Division I -- the first program in the NCAA's modern era to make the direct leap.

“Our St. Thomas community is excited to embark on this journey of building Minnesota’s first private D-I collegiate athletics program and the second D-I program in the state,” said University of St. Thomas President Julie Sullivan in a news release. “St. Thomas has a long history of academic and athletic excellence and embracing change with an entrepreneurial spirit. This move continues that trajectory.”

According to the release, the Tommies have officially accepted invitations to join the Summit League, the Pioneer Football League and the Women's Western Collegiate Hockey Association (WCHA). A conference decision for men's hockey is still pending.

Yes, the Tommies have been dominant in sports at the D3 level. As a practical matter, they outgrew the MIAC a number of years ago. They didn't necessarily dominate in football, but in all the other sports they were crushing the other conference schools on a regular basis. This particular event probably the signal it was time to move on:



You have to understand -- St. Olaf is not a doormat. They haven't contended for the top spot in the MIAC, but they are usually respectable. From the linked recap in the Sporting News:

You would think that in such a mismatched game, St. Thomas would acknowledge how much better it was and take things a bit easy. Nope. St. Thomas went for a two-point conversion three times, and was 5-of-5 on fourth down. St. Thomas knew it was better, and wanted to prove it.

And that, at bottom, is the real point. St. Thomas is an ambitious school and St. Thomas has something to prove. With an undergraduate enrollment over 6000 and a variety of graduate programs, they aren't really competing for students with Hamline and Gustavus. Their actual competitors are other midwestern metropolitan Catholic universities -- think Marquette, or Loyola-Chicago, or Creighton, or SLU. Being a D1 school will guarantee St. Thomas gets its name on the newscasts more often, even if they lose games initially. The games on the field or the courts are more about alumni pride and marketing. You can go anywhere in the country and find people who have heard of Marquette. Most people outside of the Midwest have no idea about St. Thomas. If the Tommies make the leap to D1 successfully, people will.