National Collegiate Athletic Association
NCAA News Archive - 2007
« back to 2007 | Back to NCAA News Archive Index
Double-A Zone
The NCAA News
|
The NCAA News
NCAA blogger Josh Centor recently posted the following commentary about the Academic Progress Rate on the NCAA’s Double-A Zone (http://www.doubleazone.com).
The NCAA released its third set of Academic Progress Rate data and for the most part, the results were encouraging. There has been a trend of improvement among the more than 6,000 Division I teams and that is absolutely positive. NCAA President Myles Brand constantly says that the academic-reform initiatives are aimed at changing behavior, and improvement implies that the system is working.
APR scores for football and baseball have improved, which is a good sign. Scores for men’s basketball teams, however, have dropped. Constant underperformance in the classroom will be met with historically based penalties that could include a loss of scholarships, so it will be interesting to see if men’s basketball teams change their behavior and priorities soon. I hope the membership will continue to hold schools accountable for their performance and won’t hesitate to penalize them for academic underperformance. Yes, there should be flexibility for unique situations and a waiver process is in place to deal with those instances. But I would hate to see the reform structure diluted to the point of accommodating the status quo and not prompting the behavior change we’re after.
The third year of data includes a squad-size adjustment for teams in sports with smaller roster sizes. This adjustment gives teams a “statistical benefit of the doubt,” but this is the last year the safety net will be in place. While the adjustment was statistically necessary, I am concerned that teams aren’t taking the reforms seriously enough. For example, only 3.5 percent of teams posted two-year APRs below 925 with the squad-size adjustment in place. Without the adjustment, 15.4 percent were below the mark required to avoid being subject to a contemporaneous penalty. If those programs don’t get their acts together soon, they will be in for a rude awakening in coming years.
This year marked the first round of historically based penalties. Teams that fell into this unfavorable category received a warning letter, basically a formal reprimand. I’m not sure I completely understand the need for the warning letter — we did have two years of data to let programs know how they were doing. In my personal opinion, the written reprimand isn’t more significant than being on the list in the past. I wish we were more aggressive with this first round of historically based penalties.
It’s important to mention that more than 800 teams received public recognition awards for their latest APR scores. High-performing programs had APR scores ranging from 975 to a perfect mark of 1,000.
The NCAA released its third set of Academic Progress Rate data and for the most part, the results were encouraging. There has been a trend of improvement among the more than 6,000 Division I teams and that is absolutely positive. NCAA President Myles Brand constantly says that the academic-reform initiatives are aimed at changing behavior, and improvement implies that the system is working.
APR scores for football and baseball have improved, which is a good sign. Scores for men’s basketball teams, however, have dropped. Constant underperformance in the classroom will be met with historically based penalties that could include a loss of scholarships, so it will be interesting to see if men’s basketball teams change their behavior and priorities soon. I hope the membership will continue to hold schools accountable for their performance and won’t hesitate to penalize them for academic underperformance. Yes, there should be flexibility for unique situations and a waiver process is in place to deal with those instances. But I would hate to see the reform structure diluted to the point of accommodating the status quo and not prompting the behavior change we’re after.
The third year of data includes a squad-size adjustment for teams in sports with smaller roster sizes. This adjustment gives teams a “statistical benefit of the doubt,” but this is the last year the safety net will be in place. While the adjustment was statistically necessary, I am concerned that teams aren’t taking the reforms seriously enough. For example, only 3.5 percent of teams posted two-year APRs below 925 with the squad-size adjustment in place. Without the adjustment, 15.4 percent were below the mark required to avoid being subject to a contemporaneous penalty. If those programs don’t get their acts together soon, they will be in for a rude awakening in coming years.
This year marked the first round of historically based penalties. Teams that fell into this unfavorable category received a warning letter, basically a formal reprimand. I’m not sure I completely understand the need for the warning letter — we did have two years of data to let programs know how they were doing. In my personal opinion, the written reprimand isn’t more significant than being on the list in the past. I wish we were more aggressive with this first round of historically based penalties.
It’s important to mention that more than 800 teams received public recognition awards for their latest APR scores. High-performing programs had APR scores ranging from 975 to a perfect mark of 1,000.
© 2010 The National Collegiate Athletic Association
Terms and Conditions | Privacy Policy