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.

Tommies get the boot

So the University of St. Thomas is getting the boot from the MIAC, and the decision is getting national attention. Even Sports Illustrated has weighed in:

The Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (MIAC) is showing one of its most successful founding members the door.

The 13-school Division III league has decided to kick out the University of St. Thomas, one of its founding members, due to concerns about “athletic competitive parity.”

In short, St. Thomas is just too good at sports for the rest of the MIAC, and if the Tommies had stayed, the teams they had been pummeling were considering leaving, threatening the future of the conference.

Most people have been concentrating on the exploits of the Tommies on the gridiron, where they've been less than gentle in their treatment of their foes, as SI notes:

St. Thomas has an enrollment about twice the size of the next largest school in the MIAC and is one of just two league members with at least 100 players on the football team, according to Pat Borzi of MinnPost. Add in the fact that in 2017 the Tommies’ conference results included an 84–0 rout of Hamline and a 97–0 thrashing of St. Olaf, and it starts to make sense why other schools wanted them gone.

I couldn't find footage of the St. Olaf game, but it was something like this:

So football is a source of contention, but the larger issue is the overall level of dominance:

St. Thomas only started dominating football after current coach Glenn Caruso arrived in 2008, but the school has begun to dominate most other sports, too. Since the 2013–14 school year, St. Thomas has 72 MIAC titles across all sports; the next closest league member has 16. 

We've seen this before -- my beloved alma mater, Beloit College, got the boot from the Midwest Conference in 1951. Tom Oates from the Wisconsin State Journal tells the story:

Starting with the 1945-46 season, [Coach Dolph] Stanley built a program that would compile a 242-58 record in 12 years, finish as high as third in what became the NAIA tournament and become so dominant it was expelled from the Midwest Conference following its sixth consecutive title in 1951.

There were no divisions in NCAA basketball at the time, but Stanley's teams beat many schools that are now household name4s in Division I, including DePaul and Loyola from Chicago, Indiana State (coached by John Wooden), Houston, Brigham Young, Washington State, Arizona and Florida State.

"He tried to schedule as many (big-time) teams as he could," said Johnny Orr, who also graduated from Beloit in 1949, coached at Michigan and Iowa State and now lives near Naples, Fla. "We travelled everywhere, man. We'd play anybody and we'd beat most of 'em."

About that last Midwest Conference game -- Beloit edged Cornell (Iowa) 131-43 in the title game. Beloit then went on to NIT, which was then a prestigious tournament, losing to Seton Hall. In his day, Stanley was merciless:

Stanley, who died in 1990, used his pressing, fastbreaking style to fill Beloit's new field house and confuse opponents.

"I remember once we were really killing the other team and there was a timeout and the coach came up the floor and he had tears in his eyes," said [former UW-Madison coach John] Erickson, who lives near Kansas City. "He said to Dolph, ‘You've got to let us get the ball to halfcourt. I've never seen this before. I don't know what you call it, but we can't get the ball up to midcourt.' And Dolph said, ‘Well, you're going to have to learn to do that I guess.' "

The Bucs of that era featured Erickson, who coached the Badgers in the 1960s, along with Johnny Orr, who coached at Michigan and Iowa State for many years, and Ron Bontemps, the star player on the 1952 U.S. Olympic team. It wasn't sustainable; Stanley eventually left and went on to Drake and the Bucs eventually were welcomed back into the Midwest Conference, where these days they are often a footwipe.

The Tommies don't have superstars, but they often get guys like Jacques Parra, who was a Division 1 player who transferred to St. Thomas and was the quarterback who led the gentle 97-0 win over the unfortunate Oles.

I'm torn about this. The Tommies are dominant in just about every sport in the MIAC, which makes it tough for the other schools to take. It’s not just about football. I understand the argument, but it’s common in all competitive activities for the dominant program to move up a level in competition. Have the Tommies have reached that point? I think so.