New NCAA APR Rules On The Horizon

[superman7515]

Mark Emmert, NCAA President, on the Scott Van Pelt Show this afternoon said that a board vote has recommended that all NCAA tournaments be tied to APR scores. If someone else was listening, feel free to correct me on the score, but I believe he said that schools with a score under 930 would not be able to participate in any NCAA tournament for that sport (FCS football, NCAA basketball tournament, NIT, etc). I believe he said that barring anything unforeseen it would come to a vote in/by October.

[MSUBear42]

Bad move... sometimes programs can't help their APR scores because of coaching changes, etc.

[klak]

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/2011-08-10-ncaa-tournaments-academic-standards_n.htm

[JMUDuke2002]

Bad move... sometimes programs can't help their APR scores because of coaching changes, etc.

Perhaps schools will be less trigger happy when it comes to firing coaches after 3 years.

I have no problem with this. It needs to be done as well as raising the minimum GPA to 2.5.

[crossfire07]

One benefit from it will be schools will be forced even more not to sign kids that really don't stand a chance to graduate to begin with. I think the GPA should be raised too. Just getting by should not be good enough.

[Lehigh Football Nation]

Again the NCAA decides to reward "retention" with the flawed APR measurement. This is incredibly bad news for any school that has retention issues in regards to finances. The big boys will find ways to spend more money to play nanny to the athletes to retain them and keep them eligible, while resource-poor schools get the hammer because they will be stigmatized as not being good enough academically.

This could doom HBCU conferences like the SWAC and MEAC to be dropped from Division I, and even conferences like the OVC and Big Sky might be deeply affected as well. And it's mostly due to the fact that they're resource-poor, not because they're sliding kids through.

I'm all for measures to improve kids staying in school, but tying it to the APR without massive reform of that index is an incredibly misguided thing to do.

[superman7515]

Question: If a school is ineligible for the NCAA tournament, the conference would be best to leave them out of the conference tournament. What if there is only 1, 2, or 3 schools eligible for the NCAA tournament? Do you even have a conference tournament? Whoever wins the conference in the regular season is given the autoberth to the NIT, but that's now run by the NCAA, so will those teams be ineligible for the regular season title as well?

[klak]

http://www.sbnation.com/2011/8/11/2357651/ncaa-tournament-mark-emmert-apr-uconn

It's looking like this would take effect in 2016, so schools have some time to get their **** together. That said, GSU's AD has had some problems with this APR thing ("we didn't know how it worked"), and if we miss the playoffs because of it, there will be riots.

[mocman1990]

The APR is like paying taxes...big corporations can spend millions on accountants and attorneys to insure they don't "pay", while small businesses get stuck in a mire of paper work and *********. And then when the small business makes a mistake, usually because they can't afford the staff necessary to go through all the red tape, they get hammered.

Overall, I support the APR. Schools should be held accountable to graduate players. The flaw lies in the retention part of the equation. If you kept a player eligible and on track to graduation and they decide to leave, that should be the end of the story, there should be no point lost because a player decides to leave. The school did its job.

In the words of Jerry Tarkanian, “the NCAA was so mad at Kentucky, it gave Cleveland State two more years of probation”

[TribeAdvocate]

The major issue to me is that this policy just seems to encourage the UNC-Chapel Hill mentality of making classes easier rather than making better student-athletes.

[jmufan]

According to this reporter these teams would have missed the NCAA tournament and or bowls


DavidTeelatDP David Teel
Seven bowl teams from last season do not have 930 APRs in latest #s. #Terps, NC State, BYU, Michigan, Tulsa, SoMiss and Louisville.
DavidTeelatDP David Teel
According to most recent APR #s, 10 teams from 2011 NCAA hoops t-ment would be ineligible, including UConn, Cuse, #FSU and Southern Cal.

[superman7515]

NCAA's APR Ruling Surprising and Timely (http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/stewart_mandel/08/11/ncaa-apr/index.html?sct=hp_t2_a9)


Less than 24 hours later, the Division I Board of Directors had already approved one of the most significant proposals to come out of this week's discussions: banning teams that don't garner a four-year APR (Academic Progress Rate) score of 930 (roughly equivalent to a 50 percent graduation rate) from the postseason -- including bowl games and March Madness.

How significant is that number? Twelve of last year's tourney teams -- including No. 1 seed Ohio State -- would have been ineligible had that standard been in effect.

The NCAA didn't stop there. You know that swirling controversy over ESPN's new Longhorn Network attempting to televise high school games? The board took care of that too. "The current bylaws do not support youth programming on collegiate networks," declared USF president and board chair Judy Genshaft.

The NCAA never acts this quickly on anything -- aside from Ohio State players' bowl eligibility, of course. Cheap joke aside, it appears the Buckeyes' much-chronicled troubles -- along with those of Cecil Newton, Bruce Pearl, Willie Lyles and every other high-profile headliner who's put a blight on the landscape over the past year -- prompted the unprecedented sense of urgency that suddenly swept through Indianapolis this week.

"Presidents are fed up with the rule breaking that is out there," said Penn State President Graham Spanier. "... Some of these things, our coaches and our boosters might not like, but we need to do what I think you are going to see happen in the next year."

Based on comments made this week, and Thursday's evidence that these things really can come to fruition, we should expect major changes in three other areas over the next six to nine months:

• An overhaul of the current enforcement process. Emmert and the presidents spoke universally of a desire to cut down on the many "nuisance rules" (free lunches, text-message limits, etc.) that take up an inordinate amount of compliance officers' time while beefing up penalties for deliberate, egregious rules violations. This will likely include expanding the classifications for infractions from the current and vague duo of "major" and "secondary."

• Allowing individual conferences, if they so choose, to implement full cost-of-attendance scholarships (as Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany first pushed for last spring) and/or multiyear scholarships. The obvious implication is that only the richest conferences could afford to do so, which in traditional NCAA parlance represents dreaded "competitive equity" issues. But the presidents seem to be lock-step with the commissioners in believing said imbalance already exists.

• Raising initial academic eligibility standards both for high school seniors and juco transfers. No specifics were offered, but they could be along the lines of SEC commissioner Mike Slive's proposal to increase incoming students' minimum core GPA from 2.0 to 2.5.