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The National Collegiate Athletic Association offered its usual good news/bad news report on athletes’ academic progress on Wednesday.
To the satisfaction of President Mark Emmert and other association officials, the Academic Progress Rates for Division I athletes over all and for players in several historically underperforming sports – football, men’s and women’s basketball, and baseball – all continued to rise.
But the number of teams punished because they failed to achieve the minimum rate set by the association also rose sharply, in part because the NCAA increased that threshold to 930 from 900 this year. A total of 36 teams will be ineligible for postseason competition in 2014-15, up from 13 this year, and another 57 squads will face scholarship limitations or other penalties, up from 36.
The average Division I Academic Progress Rate, in which scores are calculated over a four-year period (in this case, 2008-12) based on retention, eligibility and graduation rates, rose one point to 974. The NCAA has now been tracking APR scores for a decade, and the overall average has risen from an initial 961 in 2003-4. One-thousand is a perfect score.
