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OMG... was wondering what happened!  @Wilbur thanks for the tip on https://www.legacy.hockey/ it's amazing!  How old is that website?

That'd be nice, but it sounds like AD Phil Esten and the powers that be don't have much stomach for scholarship football, but if there is a path it will require some major facility upgrades. When UST's unsolicited offer to buy the Town & Country Club for an athletic village for $60 million was rejected they decided to buy the old Ford Motor plant site in Highland Park about 2 miles south of campus, where they'll move baseball and softball, but Minnesota and their endless bureaucratic nonsense will have that project stalled for awhile with environmental impact studies and whiney neighbors. Softball shares space with soccer and baseball takes up a ton of surface area on the NW side of campus just north of the football stadium. I don't know what, if anything, they have that space earmarked for, but if they could get a proper indoor facility for track/football/soccer and make some serious upgrades for spectators at the football stadium it might be MVFC worthy. Of course, having dumpy facilities never stopped Western Illinois, Indiana State, and Murray State from being part of the MVFC, so who knows. I just think if UST is going to make that type of move it will be to compete for a conference title, and there's challenges to being landlocked with unfriendly neighbors (sharing a stadium with track & field, no space to build out the stadium or revamp it, etc.). The other major issue is getting folks on board to fund scholarship football when they've clearly decided to flagship basketball and hockey, which is a little shortsighted as I think football is the hood ornament of just about every major school in the Midwest and it raises your profile in ways that hockey just can't. That said, drawing 7,000 to 8,000 fans a game would be optimistic, even with upgrades to the stadium, especially if game times overlap with the Gophers. What UST is missing is a rival like SJU to push them into an arms race, and you're just not going to get that in the Pioneer League, because Drake/Butler/Valpo just don't care enough about football. 

Anybody mention that to the Canadian Mens Olympic hockey team?

It’s in the expansion thread also lol

Didn't see this anywhere, but I've never heard anything from them, so it's interesting! https://www.collegehockeynews.com/news/2026/02/21_Maryville-Set-to-Formally.php