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 about 100 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 100 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.

Team-by-team APRs will be posted on the NCAA Web site March 1, as will the list of teams under penalty. A handful of schools still have requests pending to waive the contemporaneous penalty. NCAA officials expect those cases to be completed by March 15.

This is the second year of an APR release, but the two-year aggregate is the first upon which contemporaneous penalties are based. Last year’s APR compilation was a dry run that gave Division I institutions an idea of how the APR worked and what penalties would have been assessed had the program been “live” for that year. First-year data projected about 7 percent of all teams to fall beneath the 925 cut-off, but in reality only 3.5 percent did.

Those outcomes may be attributed to the advance notice served by the first-year test run. It not only gave athletics administrators and academic-support personnel the time necessary to understand the APR structure, but also the motivation to implement best practices in recruiting, admissions and support that prompted some of the academic culture change that reform was meant to accomplish.

“It is clear from months of talking with institutional and conference personnel that the APR structure is part of the institutional nomenclature now,” said Kevin Lennon, NCAA vice president for membership services. “Obviously, there always will be situations in which student-athletes leave school or transfer to another institution, but there is an increased focus on academic standing with those departures that may not have been as strong before in some institutions. Even with transfers, schools are taking seriously their responsibility of maintaining that student’s progress toward degree — not only for APR purposes, but for the purpose of helping that individual graduate.”

Other factors contributing to lower-than-projected APR totals include adjustments the Division I Board of Directors made in the spirit of fairness to the calculation last year. One allows teams to adjust their APR for student-athletes who leave for the professional ranks as long as they earn the eligibility point for the term in which they leave. Similar adjustments were made for student-athletes who leave school for reasons beyond the institution’s control.

The two-year data do indicate some warning signs, however. While the overall percentage of teams below 925 and the number of teams penalized are relatively low, Lennon said teams hovering near the 925 mark should plan aggressively to improve. That’s because for the first three years of the APR compilation, a squad-size adjustment, or a statistical “confidence boundary” is being applied for all teams. The adjustment helps 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.

In the two-year aggregate APR, a total of 728 teams met the 925 benchmark only because of the squad-size adjustment. Lennon said institutions shouldn’t rely on the adjustment as a safety net.

“Teams that use the squad-size adjustment to escape penalty rather than improve their academic practices right away might find the ‘pay me later’ syndrome hard to accept,” Lennon said. “As more years of APR data become available, teams will find scores harder to change. For example, an APR of 890 with four years of data and no squad-size adjustment is a hard score to recover from when only one year of data changes each year in the four-year rolling average.”

Using the two-year aggregate APR as an example, the percentage of teams below 925 without the squad-size adjustment jumps from 3.4 percent to 15.4 percent. The difference is even more dramatic in certain sports — in men’s basketball, for example, only 37 teams (11.3 percent) fell below 925 with the squad-size adjustment included. Without it, that number goes to 137 (42 percent). In football, the jump is from 43 (18.3 percent) to 96 (40.9 percent); in baseball, it’s from 40 (14.1 percent) to 111 (39.2 percent).

Lennon also warned that the third year of APR data will trigger a harsher progression of disincentives — referred to as historically based penalties — for chronically under-performing teams. The contemporaneous penalties are in place as warning shots for teams that may be on the wrong track academically.

For the most part, Lennon said, institutions have done their due diligence in implementing procedures now before it’s too late to make a significant difference. But he emphasized the importance for schools to maintain their focus as the full extent of the academic reforms near implementation.

“For most institutions, preparing for the APR structure has not been difficult, since they already had sound programs in place that ensure student-athlete academic success,” he said. “The point of academic reform is to encourage schools lacking in that regard to devote the resources necessary to help student-athletes meet research-based progress-toward-degree benchmarks that lead to graduation.

“The fact that the number of sub-925 teams is lower than projected means that the system designed to prompt the culture change we were after already is having a positive effect. Subsequent years of data collection will reflect a more accurate picture, especially once the squad-size adjustment goes away, but for the most part institutions are taking the steps necessary to meet the reform standards.”