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.
May 11th, 2009 at 1:38 am
I think we all need to remember to keep “student” first when looking at student-athletes. I realize at the D-1 level many kids are just going to college because they are mandated to do so by recent rules established by both the NBA and NFL requiring players to be one and two years removed from high school respectively, but at the D-2 level we have to be very selective with the players we recruit for a number of reasons. First we’re limited by the number of scholarships that we have so we must select players that we feel will cut it academically, because if they are ineligible they can’t help us win. Secondly, our players are often with our program for 4 or 5 years, unlike D-1, and because of our lack of scholarship dollars those players often have to take out loans to pay their way through school. I don’t think we would be doing our jobs as coaches to see that their money is well spent in terms of earning a degree. When we go out on the road we make promises to parents that we will do everything allowable by the NCAA to ensure that their son graduates and that commitment means alot to us. In summation, I feel that the APR regulations will continue to penalize D-1 programs because so many kids that play at the Big Six schools are only there because they have to be, not to get a degree.
May 12th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Great response Carter. Very good points
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