I’ve never liked football, and this sort of thing just kills me. From the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required):
More than a third of the 64 college football teams headed to bowl games this season have failed to meet academic standards set by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, according to an annual report released on Monday by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.
Last year, more than 40 percent of bowl-bound teams failed to meet the same NCAA standards (The Chronicle, December 6, 2005).
The report, “Keeping Score When It Counts: Assessing the 2006-7 Bowl-Bound College Football Teams,” comes as athletes must meet stricter academic requirements to remain eligible to compete on the field.
Under an NCAA measurement called the Academic Progress Rate, teams are scored on a scale of 1 to 1,000 based on whether their athletes stay enrolled and make adequate progress toward their degrees. Teams that do not achieve a score of at least 925, which equates to roughly a 50-percent graduation rate, may lose scholarships.
Twenty-four of this season’s 64 bowl teams scored lower than 925, the institute’s report said. Of the teams that scored below 925, more than half came from the largest six conferences.
All but four of those 24 low-performing teams escaped NCAA penalties this year, in part because the NCAA has not collected enough years’ worth of data to conclude that institutions are consistently underperforming in the classroom.
It’s good to know where these schools’ priorities are.