Five Southeast teams fall short of NCAA's new new standards

Several Southeast Missouri State teams come up short under the NCAA's new academic reform package that were recently announced, but athletic director Don Kaverman said there doesn't appear to be any cause for alarm.

That's because even NCAA officials have admitted that the new standards -- which will begin going into effect in 2005-2006 -- are so preliminary that some of the numbers can be skewed and quite a bit of tweaking is expected over the next few years.

"We have some issues we're going to deal with certainly, but we've always been concerned with those issues anyway," Kaverman said. "But overall I think we'll be in pretty good shape."

The NCAA released Academic Progress Rates (APR) for 5,720 men's and women's Division I teams, and those numbers have drawn plenty of confusion from athletic directors across the country -- Kaverman included.

"I'm continuing to read up on it, but it is fairly complicated," Kaverman said.

Kaverman called the APR the academic equivalent of the RPI, which is an often confusing formula that is used to help select at-large teams for the NCAA basketball tournament.

The NCAA's new calculation generates a score between 0 and 1,000; teams that drop below 925 could be punished by temporarily losing scholarships.

The number is determined by a points formula that rewards long-term eligibility and retention of student-athletes. Programs can lose points when athletes transfer, drop out, leave for the pros or become academically ineligible while still at the school.

Approximately 50 percent of all Division I schools have at least one team that is not making the grade. However, no team will be punished because of the current APR scores, which were based on data from the 2003-2004 academic year. Rather, they are designed as a warning so schools will know what teams are in danger of losing scholarships later when APR scores are compiled next year based on two years of data.

Further, the NCAA said that it is a misconception that teams under the 925 bar automatically lose scholarships. That would only happen if an at-risk school loses a player who would have been academically ineligible.

The NCAA also will use a statistical adjustment for teams with fewer players to prevent anomalies, and schools can appeal decisions through a waiver process.

NCAA officials also acknowledged that some low APR scores may have been the result of teams with few athletes, leading to small sample sizes within certain squads. Because of that, the NCAA said it will not be using APR data alone for the purpose of penalizing schools. Eventually, the NCAA anticipates reporting data only on the basis of a four-year rolling rate for all sports.

Under the formula, athletes receive one point each semester for staying academically eligible and another point for staying in school. For instance, a perfect score for a 13-member basketball team at a semester school would be 52.

The total number of points a team actually receives is divided by the maximum possible total to get a percentage, which is converted to the 1000-point scale.

"It really can be pretty confusing," Kaverman said. "Points early, until this process is modified, will be difficult to achieve for teams whose numbers are so small that if you have one leave, that can bring your APR down."

University of Hartford president Walter Harrison, who chairs the group that developed the APR structure, said the new system is "like announcing that we're going to have SAT scores for the first time and having nobody understand what an 1,100 means.

"In time, 925 in and of itself will mean something, but right now, it's understandable that people are struggling to figure it out."

Since the NCAA has said that the APR might not work well in its initial stages for teams with low numbers, it has introduced a "confidence boundary" that gives particular squads some leeway during the period of time when there is only a limited amount of APR data.

"The confidence boundary is designed over the first two or three years of the program to protect sports with small numbers that fall under 925," Kaverman said. "A team with only 10 student-athletes or less, it could be very hard to achieve the 925."

Of Southeast's 16 sports, five currently fall under the required APR, but four would be protected under the confidence boundary.

Men's basketball has an APR of 841, which would not be protected by the confidence boundary. But Kaverman said the primary reason the APR is low is because the squad's numbers had been down to begin with, and then one player left the program.

"The numbers for men's basketball have been down, and that's an example of why, until they really tweak and work with this, the APR is really not accurate for teams with small numbers," Kaverman said.

Also below the 925 cutoff are football (921), baseball (917), volleyball (907) and women's basketball (896), although all would be protected by the confidence boundary.

"Volleyball, of all teams, which has one of the highest GPAs in the country," Kaverman said, shaking his head.

The APR for Southeast's other sports are as follows:

Men: cross country (1,000), golf (1,000), indoor track (967), outdoor track (967); Women: tennis (1,000), indoor track (983), outdoor track (983), cross country (977), gymnastics (975), soccer (968), softball (944).

Southeast's average APR of 941 ranks fourth in the Ohio Valley Conference.

Kaverman said the new academic standards are a work in progress and figure to be modified significantly, particularly with the new NCAA graduation rate policy that will no longer penalize schools when athletes who were in good academic standing transfer.

The NCAA said that, in theory, the 925 APR is supposed to equate to a 50 percent graduation rate for student-athletes.

Southeast's most recent student-athlete graduation rate provided by the NCAA was above 55 percent. Kaverman said he is pleased with that, but he knows the university will have to be thoroughly prepared so every sport ultimately reaches the APR's 925 standard.

"I'm pleased with our graduation rates, and that we continually exceed that of the overall student body, and that we just had a record number of scholar-athletes honored," Kaverman said. "But what we need to do, and what we will do, is thoroughly educate our coaches as to what this [the APR] all means.

"Will it have an impact on recruiting? I'm not saying we're only going to recruit those with 25 ACT scores out of high school, but we have to be more cognizant of taking students of academic risk, and how we're going to monitor them when they get here."

(The Associated Press contributed to this report)