INDIANAPOLIS, IN -- Many college football and basketball players are best known for their athletic skills but those players are truly student athletes. The NCAA is the watchdog that holds universities accountable for academic standards. Those standards can be complex and universities can be penalized not only for low grades, but also for players who transfer or leave school - something that hurt Syracuse University last year.
The NCAA uses a system called the "Academic Progress Rate" or "APR" to track the performance of teams. The cutoff score is 925. Wednesday, the NCAA said SU's Basketball team scored a 912 on the most recent report. 912 is an average of the past four years. The school was apparently penalized when Jonny Flynn, Paul Harris and Eric Devendorf declared for the NBA Draft and left with unfinished work. Wednesday, Coach Jim Boeheim said the program has never fallen below the NCAA's APR threshold before and doesn't understand why the NCAA would penalize the current team because former players had a chance to play professionally.
"It's flawed,'' said Jim Boeheim in an interview with ESPN's Dana O'Neil. "There is absolutely nothing a coach can do if a kid wants to leave and train for the NBA. If he was leaving and walking the streets, I'd understand. when these kids left, they were eligible. They opted not to finish.''
SU took a two scholarship penalty last season and today Boeheim said he anticipates the team being above the APR standard when the next report is compiled.
A concern for the future is that last year's APR number was 865 - well below the 925 standard. The 865 score brought the four year average down to 912 and future scores will need to offset that to keep the team from being penalized again.
More information:
The NCAA's big boys are beating up on the smaller schools in the classroom, too.
Only seven of the 137 teams sanctioned Wednesday for poor scores on the Academic Progress Rate come from BCS conferences.
Colorado and Syracuse were the only power conference schools to make the list in the three highest-profile sports - football or men's and women's basketball. The men's basketball teams at both schools and the Colorado football team all were sanctioned for falling short of the NCAA's Academic Progress Rate cutline of 925.
The Orange basketball team scored a 912 in the APR, below the baseline of 925. The NCAA announced an immediate penalty of two basketball scholarships. Coach Jim Boeheim says the team already has taken the penalty during the 2009-2010 season in anticipation of coming up short on the standards.
“We have always been above the APR standard since it was implemented. We had three students leave school early to pursue professional basketball careers last spring and that is difficult to overcome,” said Boeheim in a statement on SUathletics.com. “In anticipation of this, we took the scholarship penalty during the 2009-10 school year. We anticipate being back above the APR standard when the next report is compiled.”
The three players Boeheim referred to who left school early last year are Johnny Flynn, Paul Harris, and Eric Devendorf. Flynn just completed his rookie season for the Minnesota Timberwolves of the NBA, while Devendorf is currently playing professionally in New Zealand and Harris was sidelined for the season with an injury.
The APR measures the classroom performance of every Division I team and is based on data collected from 2005-06 through 2008-09. SU says that 13 of its 19 teams rated higher than the national average for their respective sports in the APR, including 57% of student-athletes who registered a 3.0 grade point average or better.
Colorado will lose one scholarship in men's basketball and up to four scholarships in football. The Buffaloes scored 920 in football and 897 in basketball.
Colorado was one of 10 schools to be sanctioned in both sports, though the other nine all compete in the Football Championship Subdivision. And four of those 10 are Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Clearly, school size matters.
Only four BCS teams, other than those at Colorado and Syracuse, face penalties: men's outdoor track teams at Auburn and Cincinnati, the men's indoor track team at Auburn and the women's rowing team at West Virginia.
The other 130 teams, including 20 football and men's basketball teams that face scholarship losses, a reduction in practice time or both, come from smaller conferences.
No team received a postseason ban. Last year, football teams at Tennessee-Chattanooga and Jacksonville State and the men's basketball squad at Centenary were not allowed to compete in postseason play.
The APR is billed as a real-time academic measure of every Division I team. Each athlete receives one point per semester for remaining academically eligible and another point each semester for remaining at that school or graduating.
A mathematical formula is then used to calculate a final team score with 1,000 points being perfect. Teams falling below 925 can face conditional scholarship losses. Teams consistently falling below 900 can be penalized more harshly.
Florida International and Southeastern Louisiana each had seven teams penalized, the most in Division I.
The other schools with more than two teams on the list are McNeese State with six; Cal State-Fullerton, Chicago State, Delaware State, Howard and Nicholls State with four; Georgia Southern, Portland State, Southern University, Southern Utah, Tennessee-Chattanooga and Texas-San Antonio with three.
Tennessee-Chattanooga avoided a second straight postseason ban in football despite scoring 885 because the team showed "demonstrated improvement" over last year's score of 870.
Information from the Associated Press and SU Athletics was used in this report.
