The NCAA released Monday the preliminary findings of its new system for measuring academic performance of student athletes — the University did not fair well.
The Academic Progress Rate is a new ranking the NCAA will begin to use for the 2005-06 academic year. If the rating was being used this year, seven of LSU’s 21 teams would have ranked below the NCAA’s acceptance mark. Three would have received penalties.
Baseball, men’s basketball and football averaged the lowest APR nationally.
LSU officials said results from the 2003-04 academic year fail to give a clear picture of the athletic department’s academic capabilities.
“The APR is difficult to look at from an institution’s numbers today and say this is indicative of what the program is or the rates they’re going to have over four years,” said Miriam Segar, LSU Assistant Athletics Director for Student Services.
The NCAA set a goal last spring to graduate 50 percent of its student-athletes over a six-year period and wants its member institutions to retain 92.5 percent of its athletes over that time-span.
The NCAA created a point system in which individual teams at every institution must score at least 925 points. LSU averaged 933 points as an institution. The following formula was applied:
1) Each scholarship athlete may earn a maximum of two points per semester and four points per academic year for his/her team.
2) The scholarship athlete earns one point for maintaining academic eligibility and an second point for staying at the institution each semester.
3) Points earned are then divided by the number of points possible. This gives a decimal number comparable to baseball batting averages, which max at 1,000.
If a team’s score falls below 925 and any athlete on the team goes 0 for 2, it will receive a penalty for that year. An athlete must leave a poor-performing academic team because he is academically ineligible to incur the penalty, which results in a scholarship loss for every case.
But a maximum penalty for a given team is 10 percent of its total scholarships in an athletic year. An NCAA Division I-A football team provides 85 scholarships and could lose nine total scholarships under this penalty, Segar said.
Four LSU teams received a confidence interval, meaning the scores may be skewed this year and correct themselves over a longer period.
The men’s basketball team scored 812 points, ranking it within the lowest 10th percentile nationally. The team would have lost a scholarship if the new penalty phase were enacted this year, Segar said.
The men’s cross country team (778) and softball team (823) also would have lost one scholarship this year, Segar said.
LSU’s nationally prominent baseball (899) and football (923) programs scored below the cut score but received a confidence interval.
Eventually the NCAA will have a four-year rolling average to create a historical penalty phase for teams with poor academics over a longer period of time, Segar said. The penalties will be decided later but will include additional scholarship loss, possible loss of NCAA membership and championships.
The APR fails to take individual situations into account, LSU officials said. Athletes in good academic standing could leave for health or personal reasons, still resulting in penalties.
Some athletes leave early because of dissatisfaction with playing time, Segar said. Others leave for their sport’s professional franchises such as the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball.
“They’re doing what’s best for them,” Segar said. “They’re chasing their dreams. The basketball kid is leaving to go to the pros in April. The football kid is dropping out in the spring to chase their NFL dream.”
A professional draftee who enrolls but does not finish the semester after his senior season receives 0 of 2 points, Segar said.
“I think the injustice in this is there are situations where students might leave for personal reasons and are perfectly good students,” said Roger Grooters, LSU’s executive director of the Academic Center for Student Athletes. “If there’s an illness in the family, just a variety of different scenarios that cause a student not to return, then you’re really penalizing them one point even if they leave eligible.”
Athletes like former LSU quarterback Matt Mauck, who left the football team after graduating, will not be counted against the institutions.
The solution to improving retention rates at LSU is recruiting athletes who will stay at LSU until graduation, Grooters said.
Added LSU Athletics Director Skip Bertman: “What the NCAA has done is put a little more focus on the culture that the coach builds — that they will make the kid stay there. I think the intent is to build a culture where the kids are happy … and that the kid will stay there for five years and graduate.”