With the advent of the Academic Performance Program, its accompanying Academic Progress Rate and the addition of the Graduation Success Rate as a more accurate alternative to the federal rate, the academic performance of Division I student-athletes is more measurable than ever before.

And as the measuring sticks become more transparent, academic success is something that institutions are becoming more accountable for, especially as part of the Academic Performance Program (APP), which can dole out major penalties if certain standards are not met. But as institutions are held more accountable, will more administrators begin to hold their coaches responsible for the academic progress of their student-athletes through financial rewards for success — or even penalties for failure?

A number of Division I institutions already include incentives for academic progress in coaching contracts. Many are based on graduation rates or grade-point averages. Gene Smith, athletics director at Ohio State University, said that such incentives already were in most of the coaches’ contracts when he took the position last year, and he had a similar system while he was the athletics director at Arizona State University. He said the parameters of such clauses usually vary from coach to coach and sport to sport.

Pete Boone, athletics director at the University of Mississippi and a member of the Division I Committee on Academic Performance (CAP), which is largely responsible for monitoring the APP, said that before the development of the Academic Progress Rate (APR), academic incentives, while popular, just didn’t have an accurate metric.

“We’ve never had a fair measuring stick. If you talk about graduation rates, you’re talking about four or five years down the road, and it could be something that happened before that coach even got there,” Boone said. “But the APR gives us a real strong measuring stick. It’s current.”

Part of the job

The NCAA sharpened its focus on academics in the early 1980s when public attention concentrated on the perceived lack of both academic preparation and academic success of student-athletes.

Chuck Neinas, president of Neinas Sports Services and former College Football Association director, said it was about that time that academics began assuming renewed importance in the NCAA. Neinas, who was once commissioner of the Big Eight Conference (now the Big 12), said Proposition 48 was the genesis of the academic focus.

“Academics have taken on more importance within the coaching profession for the last 25 years, ever since Proposition 48 was brought into being,” Neinas said. “(Proposition 48 stated that) to be eligible for athletics aid and competition, you had to have certain (test) scores and a certain grade-point average.”

Institutions and the Association as a whole were embarrassed to have student-athletes exhaust both their competitive eligibility and their five-year clock and still be two or three years away from graduation, Neinas said. The academic requirements adopted through Proposition 48 made certain that student-athletes had the necessary college preparatory work before entering college. As continuing-eligibility rules evolved over the years after the adoption of Proposition 48, student-athletes are now required to make meaningful progress toward a degree every year.

“Otherwise, you could have a potpourri of subjects to maintain eligibility but you’re not moving toward a degree,” Neinas said. “As the college and university presidents have become more involved, there’s more attention given to graduation rates.”

Neinas said that when institutions come to his company for personnel searches, academics is “always discussed relative to interviewing coaches.” However, he said he knows of one “very well-known” coach who turned down a graduation-rate bonus because he believed that graduating his players was a basic job responsibility.

Some institutions have adopted that philosophy as well. Tim Curley, athletics director at Pennsylvania State University, said that academic success of student-athletes was “part of the basic expectations of the position.”

Brad Bates, athletics director at Miami University (Ohio) and a member of CAP, agrees.

“I think we all need to take a step back and really think about rewarding behavior that should be inherent and fundamental to institutions of higher education,” he said. “The intellectual development of our students is why universities exist. Athletics departments are a part of those universities. Our primary purpose as educators is to help facilitate the intellectual development of our students.”

Lorrie Clemo, president of the Faculty Athletics Representatives Association and professor at the State University of New York at Oswego, said that while holding coaches financially responsible for the academic progress of their student-athletes would send a strong message about the importance of the issue, coaches shouldn’t be held any more responsible for a student’s progress than other educators.

“We don’t tie faculty to the success of students within a major because we view the responsibility of the faculty member, just like a coach, as an educator,” Clemo said. “It requires a whole host of educators to achieve the completion of a degree for a student-athlete. To hold only one educator responsible seems to me like an unfair burden on that individual.”

Creating an academic culture

Clemo said that institutions ultimately are responsible for creating a culture that values academics and degree completion, and institutions should provide coaches — and student-athletes — with the resources necessary to meet academic goals. The academic success of a student-athlete should be the result of teamwork, not simply the efforts of the coach, she said.

According to Ohio State’s Smith, however, the financial incentives in coaches’ contracts are a way of holding coaches accountable for the culture they create.

“The coach has the ability to influence the behavior of a student-athlete in a highly positive way. As long as they’re contributing to the message that it’s important and doing what the student-athletes needs to be successful academically, that’s how they create that positive culture,” he said.

Evaluating and weighting a coach’s success at creating that culture can be a little more complex, he said.

“You can’t look at it on a scale of one to 100 and try to take out all the job duties and responsibilities and say, what is this, 25 percent? 10 percent? It doesn’t work that way,” he said. “(Academic success) is just as important as winning ball games as far as I’m concerned. And you don’t say one is more important than the other. They’re all important because they’re all part of the educational experience.”

Many believe the development of the APR will be instrumental in holding coaches accountable for the academic progress of their student-athletes. Boone at Mississippi said the scholarship losses associated with a consistently low APR will be more of a wake-up call for coaches than any financial incentive in their contract. He also suggested that instead of an incentive for academic success, coaches should be penalized financially for academic failures.

“There are so many other competitive incentives; this is just one more. You can’t put enough money in it to get their attention,” he said “Now if we ever have the courage to have a financial penalty if you don’t achieve certain cut scores or predetermined numbers, then that will get their attention. But that in and of itself won’t be as effective as the scholarship reductions and other penalties.”

Boone said he thinks the day of financial penalties is coming sooner rather than later. He said he plans to begin discussions about academic expectations with his coaches soon. He said coaches should ultimately be held accountable for the academic success of their student-athletes, though once a student-athlete is out of the coach’s control, the waters become murkier. For example, student-athletes who exhaust their athletics eligibility but do not graduate may enroll in classes for another semester, accept financial aid for tuition and room and board and never attend class.

“There’s not really a whole lot we can do about that. There are some flaws in the system, and I don’t have an answer for that right now,” Boone said.

Using the APR as a metric for holding coaches accountable is a new idea — one not yet adopted by some who find the formula difficult to grasp or believe it is not measuring what it should. Neinas said he thinks graduation rates are by far the best measure of academic success.

“I am disappointed that the attention is going away from graduation rate and more toward retention,” he said. “I’ve always thought the focus should be on graduation, because that’s the pinnacle of your college career: to walk away with a degree.”

That is where the Graduation Success Rate comes into play, though, since it tracks graduation by including transfers in the calculation, which addresses Neinas’ retention concern.

Overall, many administrators believe that the academic success of student-athletes is becoming a focal point for athletics departments nationwide.

“I can’t speak for all (athletics directors), but I am now a little embarrassed that I haven’t stressed academic success, and I probably use the excuse that there wasn’t a good measuring stick to push that on a regular basis with our coaches,” Boone said. “But rest assured, it’s what we talk about every time we meet now. Before we say ‘Good morning,’ we say, ‘How are the kids doing in class?’ It’s top-of-mind awareness. When that happens, people start focusing on it and things start getting done. I think that is what is happening right now.”