To determine college rowing’s pecking order, we took the official results of the separate national championships for each school and weighed them with a special formula to arrive at the top 25.

On the other side of the country, Brown University continues to achieve success with a similarly consistent even longer-serving coaching tradition in John (38th year) and Phoebe Murphy on the women’s side, and Paul Cooke (21st year) on the men’s. The Brown women won the majority of national championships—seven—in the first 13 years of rowing as an NCAA sport. Even as scholarships and international recruiting are increasingly key to success, Ivy League Brown, which, like Princeton and Yale, can’t offer true athletic scholarships and maintains higher academic standards for recruits, continues to feature in the grand finals of national championship regattas and rank among the best. Brown finished seventh at the NCAAs and third at the IRA.