There are three schools of the 75 in the traditional Power Six conferences that currently offer women’s cross country without a track and field team alongside it: Seton Hall, Creighton and Northwestern. In the last two decades, those teams have combined for a total of one national championship qualification. That bid belongs to the 2022 Wildcats.
This is not supposed to happen. It definitely shouldn’t happen before head coach Jill Miller — who took over a program in August 2019 that was second-to-last in the Big Ten the year before she arrived — has even watched her first recruiting class graduate.