March 16, 2006
SAN DIEGO - Mr. Schemmel,
With the focus on March Madness and upcoming spring football, how does the NCAA insure that coaches keep the kids focused on school too?
Matt
Long Beach, Calif.
The timing of this question is very good, as the NCAA is now releasing information on APR scores for sports at all Division I schools, and there has been much attention given to this by the media.
I believe APR is one of the most important pieces of new legislation that the NCAA has enacted in my many years in this business. Not only does it provide a measuring stick for academic performance, particularly graduation success, but it also provides a self-enforcing penalty if schools do not pay attention to ongoing academic success and the importance of graduation for their student-athletes.
APR is rather complicated, but hopefully I can provide its fundamental principles and define for you what we now call "contemporaneous penalties."
The NCAA takes current and historical eligibility data from each Division I school and plugs that information into a formula. That formula produces a numerical rating for each sport at each institution. The cutoff number that has been established by the NCAA is 925, which is supposed to be reflective of an approximate historical graduation rate of 50%. If a sport falls under that 925 mark, it is subject to a contemporaneous penalty. That penalty will only occur however, when a student-athlete in that sports leaves the program before graduation and while academically ineligible. We call such an occurrence an "0 for 2," meaning that the student-athlete left the program and was academically ineligible when he/she left. For example, if a basketball player leaves a program that has a score less than 925, and is ineligible when he/she leaves, that school cannot replace his/her scholarship for the next year. In equivalency sports (sports that can divide full scholarships into partials), the penalty is equal to the percentage scholarship that the departing student-athlete had at the time he/she left. So, for example, if a track and field student-athlete who was on a 50% scholarship left the program while ineligible, his/her 50% scholarship could not be re-awarded the next year.
As you can imagine, this makes coaches and athletic administrators accountable for academic success throughout a student-athlete's career. If they aren't, they will lose scholarships and in effect be unable to compete at the level we expect them to.
San Diego State currently graduates more than 80% of all its student-athletes who complete their eligibility, but frankly, our goal is to make that 100%. Many of our sports received outstanding APR scores, including a few perfect 1,000 scores. In two of our 18 sports, APR has served as a wake-up call.
Although final word from the NCAA has not yet arrived, we anticipate that we will be assessed the loss of 4 scholarships in football. Coach Long actually exercised his option to sign less than the full allotment this year and will take some of the anticipated penalty with this year's recruiting class. It's not what we wanted him to step into, and of course it was not of his making. As many of the anticipated scholarship penalties as possible were served in 2005-06, limiting mid-year signees. The remainder of the penalty, if any, from the 85 possible scholarships will be served in 2006-07.
Also, we anticipate that baseball will lose 87% of one scholarship, and we will take that reduction this year as well. So baseball is operating this season with approximately 10.8 scholarships out of the NCAA baseball maximum of 11.6.
It is simply unacceptable for us to have any sports under that 925 mark, and we have spent a great deal of time in my first 8 months working on new plans to improve our academic success in this area, including the hiring of our new Director of Academic Athletic Services, Colleen Evans. Under Colleen's leadership, and with the commitment of all our staff and coaches, we will get where we want to go.
Even though there are still a lot of kinks in the APR system yet to be worked out, I believe this is exceptionally good new legislation that will inevitably lead to better academic success for student-athletes.
Thanks for the question, and Go Aztecs!