We Judge The Women's College-Club Competitions

10.22.2025College Women

So, this article was supposed to be something else.

We started with the idea of writing about the new hybrid women's D1 college competition, which includes teams pushing exclusively for the NCR fall playoffs, and teams that are also looking at the CRAA spring playoffs.

And we started it all about saying this: "First off, college rugby for women in club teams and lower divisions continues to do its job—providing enjoyable and at times higher-level play for young women who want to compete and represent their school."

But ... is that true? Not exactly. If you measure the "enjoyable" but, we think the key measurable aspects (short of surveying players to find out if they're having a good time) is to look at what any player wants—frequency and parity of competition.

So we decided to take a little peak, and the little peak turned into a big ol' rabbit hole. We started looking at every active conference this fall (which is almost exclusively NCR but we'd like to revisit this for the CRAA 15s conferences in the New Year) and measuring the following:

Do they play?
Do they really play, as in, are the games actual games or are they forfeits?
Are the games competitive?
... Or are there lots of blowouts?

Our definition of a blowout was a game won by 50 points or more. Win a game 54-5 and we say that's a regular rugby game.

We looked at every conference result in the women's game. We might have included a game with a D1 team here and there and made some other small errors but overall this is correct. We looked at what games provided a score, what games were forfeits, and what were close or blowouts.

Here's what we found out:

Yes they play. Most conferences have seasons of 4 to 6 games, which is fine, depending on what division you play in.
There are way, way too many forfeits. We have to guess that most of these forfeits are because a team is struggling for numbers, but we know from past experience that sometimes it's a struggling team just opting not to play a game they know they're going to loose by a wide margin. Either way, the game doesn't get played. (Sometimes forfeits are actually played with borrowed players or something, but for the most part, forfeits are not played.)

This is a massive problem in some places, and a startlingly monumental problem in others.

The conference with the highest percentage of forfeits is the Northern Lights, where over 64% of their games (9 out of 14) are forfeits. Other bad ones include the MARC (30.6%, with 19 forfeits), Allegheny (23.6%), and the Midwest, Great Lakes, and Tri-State all around 20%

The Allegheny has a majority of its fixtures with no score reported. That sounds like a leadership problem.

Kudos to the Northeast, Prairie, Lonestar, and Big 10 for having zero forfeits. For the Lonestar, this is a massive improvement over several years ago when the region was Texas A&M and then ... not much.
and 4.) As for competitiveness, we had a game that was 152-0, which isn't optimal. Of the 352 results we looked at, 115, jut under 1/3, were decided by 50 points or more. Thirty-nine (11%) were decided by a try or less, including five ties. Overall that's ... not great. We have way, way too lopsided scores, and those scores are across all divisions.

Fairfield vs Fordham was a bit of a blowout.

(Fairfield scores vs Fordham in a game that was, unfortunately, very, very lopsided and not the kind of matchup anyone wants. Photo @CoolRugbyPhotos)

So what does this tell us?

A Forfeit is a Cry for Help

First off, some work needs to be done in collegiate rugby leadership (including the NCR home office) to identify high-forfeit conferences and high-forfeit teams. Your competition can get hurt much, much more by struggling teams than it can be hurt by dominant teams. Let the strong teams be strong, and get some best-practices, some coaching help, and some recruiting help to the teams that aren't able to fulfill fixtures.

The biggest problem USA Rugby used to have was they were punish first as opposed to help first. Collegiate organizations have gotten better at this, but there are clearly issues.

Reality Doesn't Care About Your Divisions

Splitting competitions along divisional lines might make sense at first glance, but it often doesn't. You can say one college has thousands of undergraduate women and another has only hundreds, but the number of undergrad women who are motivated to play a demanding club sport like rugby is limited. You might be more likely to find them at a smaller college if the culture of the school attracts those types of young women.

In the High Peaks, the best team is probably the DIII team, Colorado School of Mines. Colorado Mesa might be the second-best, and then we talk about D1AA teams Colorado or Colorado State. Dividing anything along divisional lines makes little sense here. (A caveat - we don't know who a team suited up, so maybe this example doesn't hold, but we've seen it elsewhere, too.)

The same can be said about the Lonestar (UT Austin, UTSA), and the MARC, to a certain extent. Split teams up however you want in the playoffs, but the regular season should be pitting the same-level teams against each other, rather than forcing matchups that result in 100-5 games.

The Best Conferences Are

With zero forfeits and reasonable amount of competitive games, including 18% close games, the Big 10 gets a solid B-plus. The Northeast has zero forfeits and while there aren't enough close games here (Northeastern in D1Aa and Roger Williams in DII are winning big too often) the games are played and about a quarter are decided by less than 28 points. Also a B-plus.

The South Atlantic have played 44 games so far with no forfeits and only one result not reported. Their blowout percentage of 18.6% is one of the best this fall and the conferences with better marks have other issues. They have 11.6% close games, too. This is a strong A-minus.

What About that D1 League?

The hybrid D1 league with three teams expecting to play in CRAA's spring playoffs but also committed to this fall's NCR postseason has had some growing pains. It's seven teams and we are going to have a semifinal with Wheeling vs Penn State and BYU vs Southern Nazarene.

These teams are all miles stronger than almost every D1AA team, so they have to be in this league. (Interestingly, Life wasn't asked, so we're told. Hmm ...). Currently the numbers are just OK in terms of what we're measuring here. Forfeits are at 22%, blowouts are at 33%, and close games at 22%. That's not bad. Really we can't have these forfeits, but there's also a travel issue, especially in the West.

We do have to bring shame back to forfeits. BYU had both of their D1 games be forfeits: Aquinas forfeited to them, but the Cougars forfeits to SNU. Poor Southern Nazarene should have played eight games so far in all levels and one was canceled, three were forfeits by the opposition, and the remaining four games 315-5.

That's a problem, too.