Few big-name schools will lose scholarships as a result of the Academic Progress Rates report released Wednesday. The NCAA said that 99 Division I sports teams at 65 colleges and universities -- or less than 2 percent of 6,112 Division I sports teams nationwide -- will lose scholarships for poor scholastic performance by their student-athletes. In Division I-A football, Temple (9), New Mexico State (6), Toledo (6) Hawaii (5), Middle Tennessee (5), Western Michigan (5) Buffalo (3) and Northern Illinois (2) were penalized.
"You've got to bring in kids that not only want to make it to the NFL, but also want to graduate and get their degree," first-year Middle Tennessee coach Rick Stockstill told ESPN. "If a kid just wants to graduate and not make it to the NFL, I'm not interested. If he wants the NFL and not the degree, I'm not interested. You have to do a good job in evaluating. We're getting out of the Prop 48 business."
In Division I basketball, Cal-Poly (2), Centenary (2), East Carolina (2), Hampton (2), Jacksonville (2), Kent State (2), Maryland Eastern Shore (2), New Mexico State (2), South Carolina State (2), Texas State (2), Sacramento State (1), DePaul (1), Florida A&M (1), Lousiana Lafayette (1), Louisiana-Monroe (1), Louisiana Tech (1) and Prarie View (1) were penalized.
First-year New Mexico State coach Reggie Theus told ESPN.com that it wasn't fair that a new coach gets penalized for past transgressions. The Aggies will lose two scholarships, a decision Theus said NMSU appealed to no avail. He will have to take off the scholarships from his maximum 13 for next season...
Poor NMSU. I mean, seriously, so many athletes go to NMSU to go to the pros, because there are So Very Many pro athletes from that school. I mean, it's practically a farm league team for pro football and basketball!... No, really, it is! there must be, what, maybe two in the NFL, and none at all in the NBA! Doesn't that say "farm league team needing punishment" to you?
Sad thing is, with the possible exception of DePaul (and I can't imagine what's going on to get that school on the list; they should be better than that), it's not really likely that anyone is attending most of those schools with the thought, "Pro leagues, here I come!" Not if they're vaguely realistic, anyway. And granted, your average 18-year-old may not be all that realistic -- after all, they've been hot stuff for their entire high-school career, so it may take them some time to get the whole "one among many hot-stuff guys at a second or third rate athletic school" thing. But by the time that progress rates come into play, the situation should have come into focus.
....As many as 350 Division I sports teams were in danger of penalties at this time last year. "We are encouraged by the response on many campuses to academic reform," said NCAA president Myles Brand. "The goal of academic reform is to improve academic behaviors and increase graduation, not unnecessarily penalize teams."
Call me cynical, but somehow, I simply do not believe that 185 schools somehow managed to get all their athletes in to passing-grade shape in only one year. To be fair, some of the failing athletes are now gone ... but they also had to have pulled some in. That's just the nature of the process. Frankly, I'm wondering if perhaps the records here and there might have been fiddled. After all, they've done it before -- that's kind of how they got into this mess in the first place.
And, in fact, 185 schools technically did not improve that much; it's just that since it's a two-year rolling statistic, many of them were fine the first year and pulled onto the list the second year, or vice versa.
Academic Progress Rate data from 2003-04 and 2004-05 indicate that fewer teams than anticipated failed to meet the 925 cut-off score that subjects teams to contemporaneous penalties. Further, fewer than 2 percent of the more-than 6,100 Division I teams will lose scholarships because of academic under-performance.
The two-year aggregate APR shows that only 215 teams will fall under the APR safe-haven score of 925, but only 99 actually will incur a contemporaneous penalty - a one-year reduction in grant-in-aid maximums - that must be taken either this year or next. The 99 teams are from a total of 66 institutions, and more than two-thirds are clustered in three sports - 23 in football, 21 in baseball and 17 in men's basketball....The two-year data do indicate some warning signs, however. A total of 728 teams met the 925 benchmark only because of a squad-size adjustment, or a statistical "confidence boundary" that is being applied for all teams to ensure that low-performing teams are accurately identified given the smaller than intended data set. For now, as long as the squad-size adjustment puts teams at or above 925, they are not subject to penalty. However,the squad-size adjustment will be removed from the APR calculation after next year when the data sets are large enough to ensure accuracy.
Mind, the improvement rate is still something to be looked at askance -- academic improvements generally tend to show small incrmental increases, and not vast upward bounds -- but it's not quite as dramatic an improvement as it first appears. And it's highly likely that next year, when the statistical correction is removed, several more schools will be penalized than were this year, almost certainly including a great many "top schools."
All currently available APR data has been posted by the NCAA on its academic reform website.
As noted in the MSNBC.com article on this topic, there's some concern because historically black colleges and universities were getting penalized out of proportion to their presence in the NCAA -- although, as a practical issue, it looks like what's happening is that 2d rank athletic programs are, in general, being penalized out of proportion to the offense. Thing is, the historically black colleges, the 2d rank (athletically) universities ... those are the ones where, even if you're an athlete, the university really does seem to see its mission as education. (Yes, yes, all universities see their mission as education; it's just that the ones where athletics is primarily a way to get people into the university seem to feel that even the athletes deserve that education, and work to help them more.) And these are the universities that are being told, in effect, "Yeah, that whole education mission thing? That's getting you into trouble. You need to get yourself some big-time athletes, get them in and out in no more than two, three years, so that they don't hurt your athletics bottom line any more. Either that, or get yourself a lot of serious students in your athletics program. Your teams may completely suck, and not in the good way, after that, but at least your progress rates will be fabulous! Of course, if they're that serious about their studies, they'll likely quit the team if it takes too much time away from their studies, but them's the breaks!"
Posted by iain at March 01, 2006 04:16 PM
