The APRs: Bobby Knight Was Right
The NCAA released its third annual round of academic progress rate ("APR") reports yesterday and the upshot is simple: While 40% of college football programs missed the alleged 925 "cut-off" standard, the NCAA waved its magic wand (called the "squad size" adjustment) and opted to sanction only one BCS-conference football program. That was Arizona, if you were curious. Without getting into all the gory details of the squad size adjustment, we simply note again this spring that the explanation that a sport with an 85-man roster needs slack for "small sample size" strikes us as complete bullshit. (If you'd like to revisit last spring's rant on this topic, click here.)
Closer to home, Toledo continues to struggle and has now lost a cumulative total of four scholarships to APR sanctions while Ohio State proved that they have under-appreciated skills in either (a) "tutoring," (b) statistical manipulation, or (c) playing the "Price is Right" (get as close as you can to 925 without going under!). Overall, the enforcement trend remains one of hitting historically black colleges and non-BCS programs hard while letting the big boys skate. The entire list of sanctioned programs can be found here.
Meanwhile, Miami continues to post some of the best scores in all of Division I—an accomplishment of which Brad Bates and his coaches should be justly proud.
EDITED to note: Our own sharp-eyed Maz notes that while the inscrutable squad-size adjustment is slated to disappear next year, schools apparently will be able to avoid sanctions by "having a plan" in place to improve their APRs. We don't doubt for a minute the capacity of the BCS schools to lawyer up and drive a truck through that loophole.
Were we as brilliantly funny as Orson Swindle or as earnestly indignant as Brian at MGoBlog, we could make a lot of fun of Myles Brand or call for his head to be paraded around on a pike. Since, alas, we are a simple country tax lawyer with no particular talent for verbal evisceration, we merely report the facts and let you make your own jokes. We will, however, remind you of the prescience of Bobby Knight, who once noted that "the NCAA is so mad at Kentucky that they're going to put Cleveland State on probation again." Knight's old boss likes to style himself as a reformer, but the continuing slipshod enforcement of the APR sanctions shows that nothing much has changed.
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