What does the NCAA's athletic APR mean?

Let's take a look at the formula & take a step back

Duke has 16 teams with a perfect APR for the academic year just completed, second only to Notre Dame (17) within the ACC. These stats were part of the NCAA’s release of them nationwide—you can search any school, any sport here.

Dave Schnase, NCAA vice president of academic and membership affairs, said, "As the college athletics landscape continues to evolve, what remains unchanged is the academic success of student-athletes. We applaud the incredible academic achievements of hundreds of thousands of student-athletes and the support provided by their schools. We are committed to supporting the continued advancement of their academic success and athletic pursuits."

Each academic year, every Division I sports team's APR is calculated using a simple and consistent formula. Scholarship student-athletes can earn 1 point for staying on course for a degree in their chosen major and 1 point for being retained (or graduating) at the end of each academic term. For schools that do not offer athletics scholarships, recruited student-athletes are tracked.

The story also notes the return of athletes who left school without a degree and who later returned to receive one, which is great news and a phenomenon to be encouraged and facilitated.

Additionally, many former student-athletes are returning to the classroom to complete their degrees after exhausting their athletics eligibility. In the past 21 years of the Academic Performance Program, nearly 22,000 student-athletes have gone back to school to earn their degrees and APR points for their former team. For football (6,428), baseball (2,416), and men's (1,657) and women's basketball (761), more than 11,000 former student-athletes have returned to college and earned degrees. These student-athletes are typically not counted in the federal graduation rate or Graduation Success Rate calculations.

What does ‘on track to get a college degree’ Mean?

The concept of ‘on track’ to get a college degree will differ across schools, inevitably and necessarily in numerous ways (in 4 years? 6 years? Many schools have different rules about continuation toward major based on year? If a student transfers, there are non-trivial questions about how credit is granted, and so-on). These issues are handled by each individual institution and defined by them as is always the case. If a school accepts a junior, and during that players senior year they remain eligible for a fifth year but have yet to graduate, that student will be counted as a 1 + 1 for the APR calculation.

Let’s dig into the formula, just so we can see what is being measured. Here is a site that helps athletes navigate the complex world of eligibility, transfers, and the like.

Each Division I scholarship player can earn 2 points in a given academic year. 1 for being in good standing at the end of each semester (academically eligible for the next semester), or graduating at the end of a spring semester. A quick example:

As an example, the 27 scholarship players on a Division I baseball team can earn 108 APR “points” in an academic year (the “eligibility point” and the “retention point” for each semester, so 27 players x 2 points, x 2 semesters = 108).

If 7 players don’t stay in the program or aren’t eligible to return in the Fall, there will be 7 “points” lost for that team (108 potential points – 7 lost = 101). 101 divided by 108 is 93.5, so that team’s APR would be 935.

A few quick points on the basic formula:

• This is an attempt to develop a summary measure to be applied to many different sports, being played at many different institutions. It is a good faith effort to develop such.

• Note that the House v. NCAA settlement, that remains in flux, could impact the number of players included in this calculation for a given sport depending upon how roster size limits are worked out.

• The concept of ‘on track’ to get a degree is a general one, and individual institutions determine their own rules for degrees, and progress toward same. Those rules are governed via accreditation.

What About All the Transferring Between Institutions?

A university with players transferring out and in could still have a perfect score because an allowance is made whereby a player does not ‘lose a point’ for leaving school to transfer, turn professional, or just decide to take a break, if they have a GPA of at least 2.6. The idea is that they are leaving on good terms and could continue as their institution, but they have chosen not to do so.

When a student-athlete transfers from a Division I university to another 4-year university, their team can lose a “retention point” unless the athlete has a GPA of at least 2.60.

The reason? When a transferring athlete has a GPA of 2.60 or higher, their team can receive an APR “adjustment” so that they won’t lose the retention point for that athlete. As a result, that team’s APR won’t be negatively impacted by the athlete’s transfer.

The general concept of ‘on track to earn a degree’ sounds great, but is hard to measure across institutions, so a GPA standard is used to measure this—a 2.6 GPA means a player left a university ‘on track’ or in good standing and so their leaving does not harm the school they left in terms of their APR. It is unclear to me if the 2.6 GPA is for the last semester the player was in the school they are leaving, or is it a cumulative GPA? There are players that have played at 3 or more schools since the opening up of transferring, and so a cumulative GPA would be cross-university.

Is It Possible for Football and Men’s Basketball to Have a Perfect Score?

Let’s take a look at Notre Dame’s statistics that are just out.

Notre Dame lead’s the power conferences with 17 teams attaining perfect scores, and neither Men’s basketball, nor Football did so. The 990 for football means that 99 percent of the football players at Notre Dame the past four years finished their last semester by either graduating or transferring with a GPA of at least 2.60. For Notre Dame Men’s Basketball it is 97.5 percent.

Duke is second among power conferences with 16 teams having perfect scores. In the ACC, Clemson and Boston College had 10, NC State 9, UNC 4 and Wake Forest 2 (to get the other 3 ‘big four’ schools). I must say that Wake Forest having the smallest number of teams with perfect APR scores in the ACC….was a bit of a surprise to me. Wake Forest is definitely getting left out next time there is a conference realignment, and so I would guess they are preparing for a post big-time sports reality. That makes me want to know a bit more about measurement of the good standing standard.

Digging in a bit on Football, the big four schools in the ACC have APR as follows: UNC 996, Wake Forest 995, Duke 987 and NC State 987. All four ACC big four schools are in the top 20 in terms of Football APR for the just released figures. Basically, each of the four have virtually every player leave school either via graduation or transferring, going pro or simple leaving school with at least a 2.6. There are a few exceptions.

And there is only one football team with a perfect score this year for football, and it is Ohio State, the National Champion. That is amazing.

Now many of the folks reading this are linked with Duke in some way and so are now shouting at the screen 9F and “but UNC cheats” they are certainly lying, cheating and stealing! There is no way they have the best football APR in the ACC.

Let’s Talk About the UNC Academic Scandal

This is a good account of what my friend Holden Thorp called the biggest academic scandal in 50 years. UNC managed to avoid the most strict NCAA penalties because more than half of the students who took the so-called fake paper classes were not athletes. There was an athlete cohort and a non-athlete, primarily fraternity cohort of students who took such classes. For me as an alum and more importantly a faculty member, the most embarrassing part of the scandal was that faculty were at the heart of it all. However, I think it is useful as we look to the future of college sports to briefly walk through how the scandal unfolded and to reflect on where we are now.

What very few remember is that it all started as an impermissible benefits investigation, and academic fraud came to light in subsequent investigations that were began by an NC State message board (really) and then taken up by the Raleigh News and Observer, and then Chancellor Holden Thorp initiated internal investigations that morphed into an outside one carried out by a third party, and finally the NCAA. And Holden ultimately resigned over it all even though he bore no responsibility for it, other than being the Chancellor when it came to light.

The impermissible benefits identified by the NCAA were that seven football players received a combined $27,000 in travel benefits that violated the NCAA’s amateurism standards at the time. One tweet from one UNC football player started it all. He said to the World that he was in a nightclub with someone linked to an NFL agent, and the note was seen by an NCAA enforcement person and they followed up. His plane ticket to Miami had been paid for by someone adjacent to a sports agent and that was not allowed then.

Let me say that again, $27,000 among seven players, not per player. We have now simply made such legal and then some, by orders of magnitude. Players now leave one institution for another based on how much money they can get paid, and that is totally fine per the APR calculation so long as the player has at least a 2.6 GPA.

I am so torn by all this. I think paying the players is just from an economic perspective. And I love to watch them play! However, a slight modification of an assignment I gave students in a class last year comes to mind as I finish this piece, where I will end as a question for us all.

“What will faculty that we will never meet say in 100 years when they look back on our role in normalizing the professionalization of college sports?”