And to be fair, they used to be in a major conference anyway.
Rice and SMU were in that conference with them. It was a "major conference" of a forgotten time.
As for the commuter thing, yeah definitely a thing in the past. But like my alma mater, schools with tons of beds on campus and a campus life by definition aren't commuter schools.
As you imply by the "thing in the past" part, the campus life improvements are still quite new. It takes a while to create a real marketable fanbase. Don't know exact dates but a lot of their new on campus housing has only been around for a year or two. <=20 year olds aren't going to turn into a marketable fanbase for quite a long while, even given perfect conditions as far as win/loss record.
Also, don't fall for their talk about being a tier 1 research school. It's a mirage, they got tier 1 by the organization that evaluates solely on research dollars, not by the organization that every other school in the country actually cares about that evaluates on a bunch of other metrics.