The NCAA released its first report Monday about the state of academics for all athletic teams at its 326 Division I institutions.
The initial report, which draws from the 2003-04 academic year data, will be used as a warning for individual sports teams that do not meet the NCAA Academic Progress Rate (APR) standard.
The program, which takes effect during the 2005-06 season, issued the initial report cards to Division I schools to inform them about scholarship reductions that could have occurred based on 2003-04 data.
Using data from both the 2003-04 and 2004-05 academic years, the NCAA will notify schools facing penalties in December 2005.
For every Division I team, the magic number is 925.
This is the APR score that represents a 50 percent graduation rate of players, but the number is actually more complicated.
This figure is supposed to be a real-time look at an athletic team's academic status at a specific time period. Teams with APRs below 925 will receive "contemporaneous penalties," according to an NCAA News article.
"Contemporaneous penalties are those that prevent programs from replacing the grant-in-aid for one year of a student-athlete who leaves the institution and would not have been academically eligible had he or she returned," the article stated.
All teams with an APR of at least 925 will avoid any immediate NCAA penalties.
"The overall goal of the program is to increase retention and graduation among student-athletes," said Kent Barrett, NCAA associate director of public and media relations.
The NCAA is not trying to discourage athletes from going pro, Barrett said.
Almost all U of M athletic teams appear to be on the right track, according to the preliminary report.
"At The U of M, the goals we have as a University and as an athletic department are still in place," said Joe Luckey, U of M director of athletic academics. "This is a timely measure in writing and numbers of where you are as a university in terms of graduation and retention."
In a release Tuesday, The U of M confirmed what the NCAA compiled in its report. "The University of Memphis posted an overall passing mark of 941 for the entire athletic program and had 11 of its 18 sports exceed the mandatory cutoff number of 925," the release stated.
If a specific sport does not meet the minimum NCAA requirements, it could lose up to 10 percent of its scholarships for one year. For teams such as men's and women's basketball, which the NCAA identifies as "headcount sports," only two scholarships could be taken away. For these "headcount sports" confidence boundaries are used in figuring the team's APR.
This is the case for the 2003-04 APR for U of M men's basketball, which has a reported APR of 891 with an upper confidence boundary of 925 or above. These boundaries are used to evaluate small teams, where a small data set for one year would not accurately evaluate a team's academic performance.
The Academic Progress report for The U of M lists only one team that is sufficiently below the 925 requirement. However, the 875 score for The U of M indoor track team only includes data from the 2003-04 academic year.
If the indoor track team does not meet the 925 mark by December 2005, they could face immediate penalties.
The U of M football program's APR for 2003-04 was 960, well above the required 925 and the national Division I football team average of 921.
The data reported by NCAA schools only include academic performance for athletes receiving athletic scholarship money.
"A walk-on not receiving money from the athletic department would not be included in these reports," Luckey said. "It is still not completely representative of every student-athlete who is currently competing."
In the athletic department's statement Tuesday, athletic director R.C. Johnson addressed the APR report.
"The goals of the APR are identically the same as the goals of the athletic department," Johnson said in the release. "We want to retain our student-athletes, have them make progress toward graduation and ultimately, receive their degrees from The University of Memphis."
The new system is essentially a semester-by-semester snapshot of academic performance.
"The APR report is just a mechanism for the NCAA to actually report data in a more timely fashion rather than just depending on graduation rate reports that are six years old," Johnson said. "We will now receive more timely information on our retention rate for student-athletes."
