There are a lot of things you can blame on college basketball coaches.
If they’re not overtly breaking rules, they’re navigating the gray area connecting recruits, agents and middlemen. They often try to convince NBA-ready players to come back to school out of pure self-interest. And certainly, the quality of basketball being played in college lately isn’t a testament to their collective coaching acumen.
But when the NCAA releases its annual Academic Progress Rate (APR) today tying coaches to the academic performance of their players, they’re going to blame the wrong people and prescribe the wrong solution.
Shamed by years of stories about high-profile programs that never bothered to graduate players, the NCAA developed the APR formula to — in theory — monitor whether schools are keeping athletes on track for degrees.
When the NCAA started applying the APR in 2005, it established a benchmark score: 925 out of 1,000, which is supposed to equate to a 50 percent graduation rate. Programs that fall below that number over a four-year period will face penalties starting with scholarship losses, reduced practice time and even a postseason ban. Last year, the NCAA decided it liked the APR so much it published a database not just for schools, but for coaches, too.
This, of course, serves the NCAA’s true purpose: Not to penalize and correct, but to make coaches play off reputation, something that has been going on — in college basketball, particularly — for years. It does the NCAA no good if the public believes everybody cheats. It works much better to let the media put a white hat on Roy Williams and a black hat on John Calipari and ignore the inconvenient fact that all of them are just trying to survive in the same pool of slop.
To that end, the APR works beautifully. When the numbers come out today — national champion UConn, notably, will lose two scholarships — putting coaches into neat little academic boxes will be easier than ever.
But in practice, nothing about the APR makes sense.
“The APR is flawed,” said Tom Penders, who won 648 games as a Div. I head coach. “Most coaches don’t understand it. Until somebody stands up and draws a picture of the whole thing and sees how it could affect them, it’s too late.”
It doesn’t do coaches much good to complain about it publicly because nobody wants to look like they’re shirking responsibility for academics. But Penders, now retired after leading Houston to the 2010 NCAA tournament, has made discrediting the APR something of a pet cause.
When Penders took over at Houston in 2004, only two basketball players since 1986 had graduated, he said. The team was also underperforming on the court, winning a total of 17 games the two years before Penders arrived. With the new regime came significant roster turnover; Penders said he didn’t ask any players to leave, but many of them transferred anyway.
If an athlete transfers with less than a 2.6 grade-point average — essentially, a B-minus — the original school will lose APR points. So even though Penders was starting to graduate players (the graduation rate reached 50 percent by the time he retired) and Houston had increased its academic support, the initial exodus put Houston in a hole. In the NCAA database, Penders is credited with an APR of 925 only once in six years.
That was just one concern Penders raised in a letter to NCAA president Mark Emmert last December, along with a list of 19 schools in the 2010 NCAA tournament whose APR scores didn’t match up with graduation rates. Some were like Cal-Berkeley, which graduated just 20 percent but had a solid APR of 944. Others were like Purdue, which had a terrific graduation rate at 64 percent and a sub-standard APR of 900. On top of that, another group of well-respected academic institutions such as Maryland and Georgia Tech were failing on both counts.
Meanwhile, graduation rates across the sport have gone up just two percent since the APR went into effect.
“I don’t have a dog in the fight anymore,” Penders said. “I just think it’s unfair that coaches are being labeled with numbers that they have very little control over, and second of all, that don’t correlate. It just doesn’t wash.”
The fundamental problem with the APR is simple. Like any other rule, the smarter coaches know how to game the system.
The main key to staying out of APR trouble is not whether players graduate, but whether they are in good academic standing when they leave. So when John Wall goes one-and-done but finishes the spring semester, Kentucky doesn’t get penalized. When three Syracuse players left to go pro in the spring of 2009 without bothering to complete their courses, it led to a huge APR hit, even though there was nothing Jim Boeheim could do to stop it.
And with coaches now having contract bonuses tied to the APR — UConn’s Jim Calhoun is losing $187,500 — it only creates incentive to churn players through the system without giving them a real education.
So what’s the NCAA’s answer to programs that can’t manipulate the APR? They take away scholarships, which isn’t a penalty for the program as much as for athletes. Coaches rarely use all 13 scholarships on rotation players anyway. Following the NCAA’s logic trail, the remedy for a program struggling academically is to take academic opportunities away from kids.
None of it makes sense, yet a phony formula that nobody understands will be the biggest story in college sports today. Unfortunately, it won’t be the most important one.
“To me, schools that have a high APR and a low graduation rate are exploiting these kids,” Penders said. “That’s a fraudulent system.”
If they’re not overtly breaking rules, they’re navigating the gray area connecting recruits, agents and middlemen. They often try to convince NBA-ready players to come back to school out of pure self-interest. And certainly, the quality of basketball being played in college lately isn’t a testament to their collective coaching acumen.
But when the NCAA releases its annual Academic Progress Rate (APR) today tying coaches to the academic performance of their players, they’re going to blame the wrong people and prescribe the wrong solution.
Shamed by years of stories about high-profile programs that never bothered to graduate players, the NCAA developed the APR formula to — in theory — monitor whether schools are keeping athletes on track for degrees.
When the NCAA started applying the APR in 2005, it established a benchmark score: 925 out of 1,000, which is supposed to equate to a 50 percent graduation rate. Programs that fall below that number over a four-year period will face penalties starting with scholarship losses, reduced practice time and even a postseason ban. Last year, the NCAA decided it liked the APR so much it published a database not just for schools, but for coaches, too.
This, of course, serves the NCAA’s true purpose: Not to penalize and correct, but to make coaches play off reputation, something that has been going on — in college basketball, particularly — for years. It does the NCAA no good if the public believes everybody cheats. It works much better to let the media put a white hat on Roy Williams and a black hat on John Calipari and ignore the inconvenient fact that all of them are just trying to survive in the same pool of slop.
To that end, the APR works beautifully. When the numbers come out today — national champion UConn, notably, will lose two scholarships — putting coaches into neat little academic boxes will be easier than ever.
But in practice, nothing about the APR makes sense.
“The APR is flawed,” said Tom Penders, who won 648 games as a Div. I head coach. “Most coaches don’t understand it. Until somebody stands up and draws a picture of the whole thing and sees how it could affect them, it’s too late.”
It doesn’t do coaches much good to complain about it publicly because nobody wants to look like they’re shirking responsibility for academics. But Penders, now retired after leading Houston to the 2010 NCAA tournament, has made discrediting the APR something of a pet cause.
When Penders took over at Houston in 2004, only two basketball players since 1986 had graduated, he said. The team was also underperforming on the court, winning a total of 17 games the two years before Penders arrived. With the new regime came significant roster turnover; Penders said he didn’t ask any players to leave, but many of them transferred anyway.
If an athlete transfers with less than a 2.6 grade-point average — essentially, a B-minus — the original school will lose APR points. So even though Penders was starting to graduate players (the graduation rate reached 50 percent by the time he retired) and Houston had increased its academic support, the initial exodus put Houston in a hole. In the NCAA database, Penders is credited with an APR of 925 only once in six years.
That was just one concern Penders raised in a letter to NCAA president Mark Emmert last December, along with a list of 19 schools in the 2010 NCAA tournament whose APR scores didn’t match up with graduation rates. Some were like Cal-Berkeley, which graduated just 20 percent but had a solid APR of 944. Others were like Purdue, which had a terrific graduation rate at 64 percent and a sub-standard APR of 900. On top of that, another group of well-respected academic institutions such as Maryland and Georgia Tech were failing on both counts.
Meanwhile, graduation rates across the sport have gone up just two percent since the APR went into effect.
“I don’t have a dog in the fight anymore,” Penders said. “I just think it’s unfair that coaches are being labeled with numbers that they have very little control over, and second of all, that don’t correlate. It just doesn’t wash.”
The fundamental problem with the APR is simple. Like any other rule, the smarter coaches know how to game the system.
The main key to staying out of APR trouble is not whether players graduate, but whether they are in good academic standing when they leave. So when John Wall goes one-and-done but finishes the spring semester, Kentucky doesn’t get penalized. When three Syracuse players left to go pro in the spring of 2009 without bothering to complete their courses, it led to a huge APR hit, even though there was nothing Jim Boeheim could do to stop it.
And with coaches now having contract bonuses tied to the APR — UConn’s Jim Calhoun is losing $187,500 — it only creates incentive to churn players through the system without giving them a real education.
So what’s the NCAA’s answer to programs that can’t manipulate the APR? They take away scholarships, which isn’t a penalty for the program as much as for athletes. Coaches rarely use all 13 scholarships on rotation players anyway. Following the NCAA’s logic trail, the remedy for a program struggling academically is to take academic opportunities away from kids.
None of it makes sense, yet a phony formula that nobody understands will be the biggest story in college sports today. Unfortunately, it won’t be the most important one.
“To me, schools that have a high APR and a low graduation rate are exploiting these kids,” Penders said. “That’s a fraudulent system.”
