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Working to improve APRs
UB acting to raise football team’s Academic Progress Rate
By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor
The Division of Athletics is working harder to provide academic support to UB football players after the program lost three scholarships for 2006-07 due to the team's poor academic performance in the NCAA's recent Academic Progress Rate (APR) report, Warde Manuel, director of athletics, said yesterday.
"We are disappointed to have any team below the NCAA cut line and will only increase our diligence to ensure that our student-athletes have the academic support and encouragement they need to be successful," Manuel said.
He noted that among the strategies to be pursued are providing more tutoring for football players and helping them develop specific learning skills.
"We're making sure the student-athletes are putting in the time and the attention" necessary to succeed academically, he said.
The UB football program earned the scholarship sanction from the NCAA because three players failed academically and left the university, and the team as a whole recorded an APR of 878—well below the standard score of 925 on a 1,000-point scale—in the two-year APR findings that were released on March 1 by the NCAA.
Four other UB teams fell below the 925 standard, but were not penalized with the loss of scholarships. The teams—baseball, men's basketball, wrestling and women's basketball—were deemed within the NCAA's "confidence boundary." Those programs were not penalized because it was determined they were improving their ratings and would in all likelihood climb above 925 within the four-year period of the performance program.
Although the football program had improved its APR 18 points to 878 after initial scores were released last winter, it remained significantly below the 925 standard.
Overall, UB fared well in the APR findings, with 15 of its 20 athletic teams above the 925 standard. Ten teams improved their APRs since last winter.
The APR is a key measure used to identify both high and low academic performing teams in the Division I Academic Performance Program (APP). The rate is calculated by measuring the academic eligibility and retention of student-athletes by team each semester. Based on current data, an APR of 925 calculates to an approximate graduation success rate of 60 percent, according to the NCAA.
Intended to be a four-year rate of measure, the first four-year data set will include academic years 2003-04, 2004-05, 2005-06 and 2006-07. Since the four years of data are not yet available, the APP will apply a squad-size adjustment to team APRs for the purpose of applying penalties. The adjustment helps ensure that low-performing teams are accurately identified, given the smaller-than-intended data set of less than four years.
Noting UB's stringent academic standards and the fact that both UB and the Mid-American Conference have stricter academic standards than the NCAA, Manuel was encouraged by the overall ratings.
"While we are in no means satisfied with having any of our programs below the NCAA standard, we are encouraged by the effort and improvements that our programs have made in the past year. Not a single program that was below the cut line in year one showed regression, and we can take pride in the fact that we had 11 programs that scored over 950 points," he said.
Leading the way for UB was the men's tennis program, which scored a perfect 1,000 over the two-year period. Also exceeding the APR standard were women's swimming (992), women's soccer (980), women's rowing (972), men's cross country (971), softball (967), women's volleyball (962), women's cross country (957), women's outdoor track (958), men's swimming (956) and women's indoor track (950).
In addition, the women's swimming team (14 points higher), men's cross country (12 points higher) and women's soccer (nine points higher) ranked significantly above the national average among their peer programs in Division I.