In the 2022-23 academic year, 352 universities and colleges will be full members of the NCAA’s Division I. More are transitioning into Division I, and more will compete in one or a few sports (sports where there aren’t enough teams among the 352 full D-I schools for it to make sense to have more divisions), but 352 is the national championship-eligible number across Division I in full, as the NCAA defines it.
Those 352 universities and colleges will come from 49 states, plus the District of Columbia. Alaska is the only state without a D-I school. California, Texas, and New York combine to contribute 70.
It makes sense that Alaska doesn’t have a D-I school. It’s sparsely populated. You need a lot of people to have a lot of people in one school. It makes sense also that Vermont, Maine, Hawaii, and Wyoming each have just one D-I school, for the same reason. Then, there’s Minnesota.
Minnesota also has just one D-I school.
Despite having a population larger than that of 28 other states.
It’s impressive that Washington D.C. has four D-I institutions, it’s interesting that North Carolina has the fourth-most (18), it’s intriguing that Rhode Island has a full four schools with the designation. It’s wacky that Minnesota only has one.
To be fair, the University of St. Thomas, located in Saint Paul, is in the process of transitioning up to the D-I level. But even so, that would only pull Minnesota even with the Dakotas, Delaware, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Montana, and Nevada. Not exactly humongously-populated states themselves. It will hardly be close to comparably-sized-and-also-Midwestern Indiana, which has ten current D-I institutions.
What’s going on?
There’s some talk that can be talked about the state university systems in various states, and how those states prioritize having a lot of campuses versus having one prominent campus. But that doesn’t really apply too significantly to Minnesota, whose dominant secondary education system is fairly conventional in its approach to sizes and locations of campuses. The better explanation is, “hockey.”
It’s not that Minnesotans don’t care about college sports. It’s that Minnesotans have different sporting preferences from the rest of the country, and even from their neighbors. In men’s ice hockey, there were fourteen Division-I teams this year from non-Division-I schools. Of those fourteen, four—Bemidji State, Minnesota State-Mankato, Minnesota-Duluth, and St. Cloud State—were Minnesotan. In women’s ice hockey, these are four of just ten D-I teams from non-D-I schools.
There’s some of this phenomenon in New Hampshire as well, and in Alaska, and in Massachusetts and Michigan. But New Hampshire still has multiple D-I schools with a population the fraction of Minnesota’s, and Massachusetts and Michigan each have seven D-I schools, tied for the 17th-most in the country. In Minnesota, there’s just the U of M.
In our post last summer analyzing in-state college rivalries, we referred to Minnesota as having a “single power.” We didn’t realize at the time how literal this was. And what it really signifies, to us, is how unusual Minnesota is culturally within the United States. More than arguably any other entity, a state’s colleges and universities reflect the personalities of that state. Texas and New York are widely different states, but they still end up with about the same number of D-I schools. They still enter the same arena. Minnesota, like Hawaii and Maine, is hardly even in the building.
