College Football
Schools preparing for new reforms

By Bud Withers
Seattle Times staff reporter

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• Scholarship athletes will earn a maximum of two points per term — one for remaining eligible and one for staying in school — toward their team's Academic Progress Rate. As a team, that will compute to the total points it earns divided by the total possible.

• That rate will be measured against a "cut-point" standard of all college scholarship athletes to be decided late this year by the NCAA Committee on Academic Performance. Programs below that standard the previous year are eligible for so-called "contemporaneous" penalties — the inability to re-award the scholarship of an athlete who left school and wouldn't have been eligible to compete.

Example: If Washington has 80 scholarship football players, it has a potential of 160 rating points per term — 80 times the possible two per player. If 75 players are in good standing after one term, but five become ineligible and drop out of school, Washington gets 150 points (75 times two) and a one-term APR of .938 (150 divided by 160). If the yet-to-be-established cut point is .70, Washington would not be at risk of contemporaneous penalties. (The APR actually will be calculated on an annual basis, using three terms rather than one). The goal is to present a real-time "snapshot" of academic performance.

• Broader-based "historical" penalties based on four-year APR data are eventually possible, starting in the fall of 2007, and can result in recruiting reductions or loss of postseason play. The penalties will hinge partly on how a particular program compares to its peers — that is, how the Cincinnati men's basketball team compares to other Division I men's basketball teams.

• To fix a widely criticized flaw in federally mandated graduation rates, programs will eventually earn a Graduation Success Rate ranking based on a six-year window. Unlike the currently calculated rate, the GSR will not penalize programs with athletes who transfer while in good academic standing, nor those who enter a professional draft early while still academically eligible.

• The first time a program could be penalized will be in the fall of 2005, based on academic performance this school year. But this fall, schools will be notified how they would rank based on previous pilot data.

• Other academic reforms are taking place. To be immediately eligible, incoming freshmen — now required to have 13 yearlong, high-school core-course (English, science, foreign language) credits — will need to have 14 in 2005 and 16 in 2008. Confused? Don't feel alone. Walter Harrison, the University of Hartford president who chairs the committee on academic performance, concedes, "It's going to be a little complicated to explain to people for the first year or two."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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