Beginning in 2028, the University of Nebraska will sponsor women’s flag football as a varsity sport. The NCAA now officially recognizes women’s flag football as an Emerging Sport, with the promise of an NCAA championship in the near future if more schools adopt it. No men’s flag football programs exist in the NCAA, though men and boys make up the lion’s share of flag football players in all recreational leagues. The reason for this is simple: Title IX demands that schools have as many female athletes as the female proportion in the student body. If women are 59 percent of the student body (the national average), then 59 percent of the athletes must be women too if schools want to be in the “safe harbor” for Title IX compliance.
Nebraska was about 53 percent male in 2000, but is now split 50-50. This presents a problem. Roughly 53 percent of Husker athletes are men, according to its 2025 Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA) report. Its 155 football players stifle the creation of other male sports and oblige Nebraska to fund women’s sports like flag football, beach volleyball, bowling, rifle, soccer, swimming and diving (without male equivalents). Nebraska had fifty members of its female basketball team in 2025; the men’s team had only eighteen. Nebraska cut men’s swimming in 2001 under such Title IX pressure. It hasn’t added a men’s sport since 1993. Even with all these changes, Nebraska is not in Title IX’s “safe harbor.”