Athens -- For the past eight months, Georgia coaches and university officials knew they had a major problem with the academic performance of the men's basketball team.

It was so bad that in June one academic official called it "a slow-motion train wreck."

W.A. Bridges Jr. / AJC (ENLARGE)

Head coach Dennis Felton and UGA athletics director Damon Evans are confident academic problems on men's basketball team are being actively addressed.

Your Turn Who's responsible for academic problems inside the UGA men's basketball program?   The coaches and administrators. Why were some of these players even admitted?   The players. It's up to them to go to class and make good grades.   A little of both. Everyone dropped the ball here. Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

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It was a premonition.

By the time basketball practice began in October, three players were suspended a combined 30 games.

Two were later kicked off the team.

Coaches and academic officials fretted over the problem for months and tried to address it, according to documents obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through the Freedom of Information Act.

"The entire [men's basketball] scene is a slow-motion train wreck," Ted White, the director of the Student-Athletic Academic Achievement Center, wrote in a June 22 e-mail to senior associate athletics director Carla Green-Williams.

"All are very apathetic this summer," White replied to Green-Williams' subsequent response. "No surprise of course."

"At nearly every turn we are getting extremely low effort from the men's basketball team," White wrote to Green-Williams on June 26.

Even before these June exchanges, coach Dennis Felton was worried about the players' academic performance.

"In over eight years as a head coach, including the first three here at Georgia, we have had much more success at this than we have had this year," Felton wrote in an April 3, four-page memo to Green-Williams, who oversees the academic support arm of the athletics department. "I am losing sleep while I stress over these problems and I suspect you are, too. I have never put more energy and passion into this issue as I am now and the results seem to only diminish."

Green-Williams responded two days later with a two-page memo that included: "I believe the real problem remains the players' non-compliance with not only your academic expectations, but also those of the Athletic Association."

Felton and athletics director Damon Evans said last week that these suspensions and dismissals shouldn't be perceived as there being something wrong the program.

"With regard to the basketball team and players having to miss so many games, I'm sure it caught some people off guard," Evans said. "But I'm optimistic that we've responded the right way and good things are going to come from it."

Said Felton: "These suspensions are a byproduct of raising the bar. We're not lowering it; we're raising it in terms of what we expect from our student-athletes."

Academic battleground

In response to low graduation rates — the Bulldogs' football and men's basketball teams had the lowest percentage in the SEC in the past two study periods — Evans in January put rules in place that make class attendance and meetings with tutors, mentors and academic advisers mandatory for all student-athletes. Those who do not comply are subject to suspensions and fines.

Felton says a basketball player has an average of 230 class sessions per semester, in addition to 175 academic appointments. If a player misses or is significantly late for even one, it is immediately addressed.

The first indications that there were issues brewing can be found in the memos exchanged between Felton and Green-Williams in late March and early April. They were part of the more than 200 pages of documents obtained by the AJC about the men's basketball team. Most of the e-mails were exchanges between senior-level athletics administrators and members of the athletics department's academic support team.

Evans said the exchanges, while sometimes terse, are evidence that academics are important at Georgia.

"I could see how some people might interpret that as acrimonious," Evans said. "But you know what I see? I see communication. ... They're talking about what they have to do to help student-athletes stay on task and graduate. I see that as a good thing."

Indeed, many of the memos exchanged between Georgia basketball coaches — associate head coach Pete Hermann handles the basketball team's academic matters — and members of the academic support team have to do with improving the process.

Last fall, Felton's assistant coaches and graduate assistants would go to morning and evening tutorial sessions to make sure their players were doing their work. Late last spring it was decided their presence was too much of a distraction.

Felton also had his coaches waking players so they could make 7 a.m. academic appointments before writing in an April 3 memo that "it's on them."

The problems with attendance started soon thereafter. From April 3-July 26, 22 notices from White regarding missed academic appointments or unexcused class absences were mailed to basketball players and copied to coaches. White did not return phone calls seeking comment.

"We can encourage these kids to go to class and put all kinds of policies in for them to go to class and to appointments," Evans said. "But at the end of the day, it's up to them to take care of their responsibilities."

Appears to be working

The NCAA minimum academic requirement for athletics eligibility is an 800 SAT score and a 2.5 grade-point average in high school core-curriculum courses. Regular UGA students are entering with an average SAT above 1200 and a GPA above 3.7.

So to help students who may not be academically prepared, Georgia requires all freshmen and students considered "at-risk" to attend mandatory tutorial sessions.

Most who achieve an overall GPA of 3.0 or better are no longer required to attend.

"It's a good policy," said senior point guard Sundiata Gaines, who still attends daily tutoring sessions but is on track to graduate in May. "They want to up the standards and increase our graduation rates for the athletes. Sometimes it's tough. Sometimes you don't get enough sleep. When you don't, you just have to fight through it and tell yourself they're doing it for you and you're doing it for the team. You don't want to let anybody down."

The players' academic progress is closely monitored by the academic support team as well as the athletics administrators and coaches. An online "portal" has been set up in which grades, class attendance and tutorial attendance can be reviewed.

Real-time grades are constantly updated, and coaches and administrators can quickly analyze an individual's academic situation. Colored icons next to course titles signify how a student-athlete is doing — green for an A or B, yellow for a C, red for a D or F and black for a W (withdrawal).

Similar information can be accessed for classroom and tutorial attendance and is updated daily. More than 40 "class checkers" fan out across campus each day to be sure that student-athletes are where they're supposed to be.

"When players fail to live up to their responsibilities it is addressed immediately," Felton said. "They are disciplined, they are mentored, they are talked to, preached to, yelled at, everything that parents do and adults do with young people to get them to conform and stay on the straight and narrow. There is not one missed appointment or class that goes by that is not immediately addressed with the student-athlete and with his parents."

There is evidence that UGA's strategy is working.

Felton can unleash an avalanche of statistical data to support his premise that Georgia basketball players are doing better academically than ever before.

"Before I released Mike [Mercer] from the team, we had 14 players on our team, nine of whom are ahead of schedule to graduate," Felton said. "The other five are on schedule to graduate with their class in May of their senior year, and that includes Mike."

The national rate for Division I men's basketball players to graduate within six years was 61 percent, according to data released by the NCAA last month. That's for athletes who enrolled as freshmen between 1997-2000.

"And our guys are doing it in four years," Felton said.

He points with pride to his team's Academic Performance Rates. The APR is a real-time projection of how student-athletes are performing toward graduation.

Georgia is outperforming every team in the SEC except for Vanderbilt in the latest APR, according to Felton. The results will be made public in the spring.

"Of the 12 teams in the SEC, eight of them are going to fail to meet the NCAA standard this year," Felton said. "Almost half, 43.6 percent of Division I teams, are going to fall below the NCAA's cutoff. Not us. We're at the top."