Is your school skirting Title IX's intent?

In a comprehensive data analysis, USA TODAY found widespread use of roster manipulation across many of the nation’s largest and best-known public colleges and universities – those in the NCAA Division 1 Football Bowl Subdivision.

Those 107 schools collectively added more than 3,600 additional participation “opportunities” for female athletes in the 2018-19 academic year without adding a single new women’s team. They did so by counting participants in a way that inflated the women’s rosters:

Counting male practice players

Schools can count male practice players in their report to the federal government but must omit them from their report to the NCAA. The difference between the reports can reveal the presence of such players, which serve an important role but are not women and do not play in competitions.

Double and triple counting athletes

Schools can count athletes more than once if they compete in more than one sport. An athlete that competes in cross country, indoor track and outdoor track gets counted as three participation opportunities to the federal government. This duplication tends to happen more often with women athletes.

Padding the rowing rosters

Depending on the conference, women’s rowing championships need a maximum of anywhere from 23 to 51 rowers. Teams can add more as substitutes, but how many more do they need? Based on settlement agreements from recent lawsuits, our analysis capped the rosters at 50% over the maximum, giving them anywhere from 35 to 76 rowers, depending on the conference. Any more could be roster padding. (For Wisconsin, which also sponsors a lightweight team, the max is 100.)

Eighty-six of the schools added at least eight women’s roster spots through those three methods. Those that added less than eight will show up as having added none. Scroll through the cards to see each university’s stats.