@fencingmom - I think Brown’s overall number might be 205. (It used to be 225 slots, but that was supposed to have been reduced as part of the university’s response to a 2011 review of athletics at the school. I think that Brown has increased the size of its student body in the last four or five years, but I’m not sure whether there was a corresponding increase in athletic recruitment.)
Supposedly, 30 of those slots are for the football team, and that number (appx. 30) is the cap for football teams fielded by all of the members of the Ancient Eight. Recruiting slots for the 11 teams that Brown cut weren’t the reason for Brown’s recent football woes, since the football team is maxed out on its recruitment.
The fencing team’s allocation was probably 2 or 3 slots, at most - not enough to field a self-sustaining roster of 3 men and 3 women in epee, foil and saber. That provided opportunity for walk-ons and high-achieving high school students who received “letters of support” from the coach. And it allowed all of the team’s scholar-athletes to compete against the best fencers in the country - at the Ivy League championships (which Brown was scheduled to host in 2021), at NCAA Regionals, and at the NCAA Championships (where, in 2019, a men’s foilist from Brown handed that year’s national champion, from Notre Dame, his worst defeat (5-3) of the tourney.)
One more note - women’s fencing and men’s baseball are the only two teams at Brown to have received APR (academic progress rate) commendation from the NCAA for all 15 years that the NCAA has published this metric. And there are only two other fencing teams in the country - the women’s squads at Duke and UNC - with that distinction. I guess Brown is okay throwing this badge of academic honor away in order to enhance the athletic competitiveness of its other teams with a less stellar record in the classroom.