To determine the top 25 collegiate crews in the United States, each team was assigned relative weights for competitive speed, and a proprietary formula produced an overall score for each program, with the top 25 published here.
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Right from the start, we know there will be howls of complaint about a university like Texas with a great NCAA women’s program not making the top 10 of the 2023 Rowing News Top 25 Overall College Programs. We can’t emphasize “overall” enough.
While the Longhorns finished a commendable fourth at the NCAAs—a result that would be the highlight of most rowing careers and included victory for the Texas varsity four—they didn’t score a single point in our overall ranking in the varsity heavyweight men’s, lightweight men’s, or lightweight women’s categories. Texas doesn’t have varsity programs in those three categories, although they certainly have the resources for it. That’s a choice.
Texas Crew, its club program, had some good results at the ACRA regatta, but those points weren’t enough to bring the overall score up to the level of universities that support more complete and nationally competitive rowing programs for men and women. The same is true of SMU this year and will likely be true in the years to come of many other universities that support only openweight women’s varsities.
The NCAA championships, which are for openweight women’s varsities only, are decided on team scores, while the other national championships are based on the individual varsity eights alone. The NCAA’s championship structure adds another complication to how we determine the ranking with its “automatic qualifiers” (the winners of 11 conference championships qualify automatically for the 22-school Division I field, and the remaining 11 spots are selected at large by a committee).
The result is that a program like Harvard/Radcliffe, fifth at this year’s Ivy League Championships, gets left out of the championship—and our previous ranking system—while slower, automatically qualified schools are in.
In this year’s system, we’ve added “fitting” to the process, awarding ranking points to NCAA Division I programs not invited to the championship, based on spring results against crews that were.
These rankings rely exclusively on demonstrated speed in 2,000-meter racing at season-culminating championships, with the exception of the aforementioned NCAA adjustments. They reflect the relative speed of the overall rowing programs at each college and not the quality of the experience for the student-athletes.
1. Princeton University
Princeton remains the top overall rowing college in 2023 after winning both the men’s and women’s lightweight national championships as well as finishing third in both the NCAA women’s championship and IRA men’s heavyweight championships.
The third-place finishes are even more impressive than the national championships because they came against deeper, faster fields, including universities whose athletic scholarships, program support, and coaches’ salaries exceed the Olympic programs of most nations and verge on being professional.
Rowing out of Shea Rowing Center on the man-made Lake Carnegie, purpose-built for rowing, the Tigers hardly go wanting. Even though league rules forbid athletic scholarships, the financial aid at Ivy League schools, and particularly at Princeton, is tremendous and often grant-only (no student loans) and better than athletic scholarships because it can’t be taken away.
At the end of the season, Princeton, across all four categories, was just plain fast. The Tigers celebrated in style with a massive contingent making the trip to race at Henley Royal Regatta.
