Will St Thomas Upset the D1AA Apple Cart?
Will St Thomas Upset the D1AA Apple Cart?
Who is the best D1AA college team in the nation?
It’s a tough question to answer because there are two very separate competition going on and, in the past year, two championship teams that looked about as good as anyone.
We’re talking, of course, about University of Kentucky and University of San Diego.
Both teams have won their last two finals in convincing fashion. USD won the CRAA title in the spring of 2023 and again in 2024. Kentucky won the NCR title in the fall of 2023 and then this past fall also.
Average score of the final? 45-17 with the closes winning margin being 17 points.
But they haven’t played each other. They don’t even play at the same time. That’s mostly why GRR ranked the two teams tied as #1 in our final 2023-24 D1AA ranking.
But …
Yes, there’s a but. Are these the two teams that will be ranked #1 at the end of the year? Because there is another contender coming out of South Florida.
St. Thomas may only be in D1AA for two seasons—last year and this year—before making a planned move to D1A, but the Bobcats look very dangerous indeed.
In the spring of 2024 St. Thomas capped off their season with a thrilling 27-24 win over Air Force. In that game the Bobcats looked exciting, dangerous, but also flawed. A somewhat depleted Air Force team had a good chance to win that game and only lost due to some individual brilliance from St. Thomas, led by Welton Charumbira.
Well, Charumbira was there in December, too, when St. Thomas came back from a 10-0 deficit to win 62-20. That’s a significant difference in scores. Yes, Ohio State was a little depleted, too, but they’re a very good team. St. Thomas was just, in the end, way faster.
“We already knew we fell behind because of a lot of penalties so we just needed to take care of the ball and not do a lot of stuff inside our 22,” said lock Maxi Testero after the game. “So just manage the ball and kick out, and it worked. We managed to get in front the first half.”
This was, of course, a preseason game for St. Thomas. They have the Florida D1AA season coming up. So while they have played a couple of warmup games beforehand, the match with Ohio State was still a buildup game for the season.
“It was a really big statement to us. As we’re looking to move up to D1A in [fall] 2025, we wanted to show that we are here and we’re a serious team,” added hooker Daniel Crawford.
There are still things to fix. With such a dynamic team with so much team speed, they can smooth over issues. Against a savvy forward pack like Ohio State’s, St. Thomas struggled with penalties around the ruck and, added flanker Jobe Knapton, “we crowded around the ruck too much.”
That was because they had to work a little harder to win ball there. That was a lesson they learned well in the game against the Buckeyes, as they spread out better and organized better in the second half and the tries started to flow.
All of that led to them using Charumbira, Tshepany Matubatuba, and player of the game Noku Mukumba, among others, to exploit gaps.
“It’s ridiculous,” said flanker Owen Phillips. “Everyone’s got different coaching from different parts of the world and we’re all bringing it together to make it special. They really, really are.”
It’s easy to point out that a number of the St. Thomas players are from overseas. And that’s true. The team that beat Ohio State had 15 players from outside the USA: Five from Argentina, four from Zimbabwe, and players also from New Zealand, England, Namibia, Serbia, and South Africa. But it’s worth pointing out that one of those Argentinians played for the main feeder HS program for St. Thomas, the Okapi Wanderers in South Florida.
And they do recruit heavily from Florida, so it’s an international program with a distinctly local flavor.
And it’s a team that expects to do well this year, and could be, when all is said and done, in that “who’s the best?” conversation.
“We want a challenge,” said Phillips. “We are trying to challenge ourselves and push ourselves every day. This game against Ohio State was a challenge, but we want bigger challenges.”
