The APR is Widening the Recruiting Gap
May 7th, 2009 - byOn Wednesday the NCAA handed out their stiffest APR penalties to date. While many educators cheered others looked at the data and saw a growing divide between the haves and have not. The two main parts components to calculating a schools APR report is to make sure your players graduate and make sure they don’t transfer. This means that when a new coach comes to a program and cleans house he could very well be hit with scholarship reductions when he needs them most. This situation recently played out at Indiana when Tom Crean dismissed most of the previous year’s team and watched one player leave early for the NBA. IU was rewarded for taking a hard line on academics with a reduction in scholarships this week (they anticipated the penalty and took the hit last year).
Its also becoming clear that schools with the resources to devote to extra educational attention to athletes are in a position to capitalize. Of the 85 team penalized in football and men’s basketball only 11 came from outside of the Big-Six power conferences. NCAA president Myles Brand agreed that the cost of compliance could be cumbersome.
“The truth of the matter is that if you’re going to compete at high-level in college athletics, then you have to provide what they need in terms of equipment and recruiting and that’s not inexpensive,” Brand said during a conference call with reporters. “You also have to provide what the student-athletes need to graduate.”
Some might disagree, but as I wrote earlier today, these APR rules aren’t going anywhere. That means coaches will be recruiting athletes they trust will graduate.
