SEATTLE – The Committee on Academic Performance will allow the NCAA staff to waive portions of some of the more serious penalties levied by the Academic Performance Program.

CAP members made their decision after reviewing the first round of in-person hearings conducted for six teams at five institutions in February and April.  The committee remains committed to allowing institutions to appeal the postseason-ban (occasion three) and restricted-membership (occasion four) penalties in person, though the likelihood of an increasing number of appeals could cause the group to consider offering a teleconference as an option.

Allowing the staff to offer partial relief of some of the penalties (for example, in the third year of historically based penalties, waiving the scholarship and practice time reductions but still imposing the postseason ban) could also reduce the number of appeals hearings, though institutions will continue to have the option to appear before the committee. Previously, the staff could provide only full relief of a penalty or conditional relief based partly on a team’s performance in the following year.

Subcommittee given remand option

This year, two teams appealed the CAP decision to the presidential subcommittee, the final appellate body in the process.  The subcommittee approved one appeal and denied the second, but suggested that the CAP revise its policies to provide the subcommittee with a different option – to remand the appeal back to CAP with specific instructions on a procedural element.

For example, if subcommittee members believe CAP did not interpret its policies correctly in hearing a penalty appeal, the presidents want the ability to direct CAP to consider its policies differently and make a final penalty decision based on the corrected application of its policies.

The CAP agreed and changed its policies to allow the subcommittee to remand cases, with specific details of how they will be considered at the committee’s October meeting.

The committee also decided to be more transparent in its annual release of APR information. As schools have become more comfortable with the data-reporting process and the media becomes more interested in the more restrictive historical penalties, the committee agreed to allow NCAA national office staff to more fully explain processes and rationale behind particular decisions than in the past, rather than relying on institutions to do so themselves.

Other highlights

In other business, the CAP:

• Agreed to allow student-athletes with one year of eligibility remaining on teams facing occasion three and four penalties (postseason ban and restricted membership) the opportunity to transfer under certain conditions without costing their team a retention point in the APR formula.
• Examined data about the effectiveness of the filters the committee uses to excuse some teams from penalties, including resource levels, institutional characteristics and how a team performs compared to other teams in the same sport. The committee will monitor the impact of the filters and whether adjustments are changing how the APR penalty benchmarks predict a team’s eventual Graduation Success Rate.