ATHENS – Georgia has finished at the top of the SEC -- and the nation -- in college football the last three years. The same cannot be said about the Bulldogs’ academic performance.
According to the most recent Graduation Success Rate (GSR) data released by the NCAA on Dec. 6, Georgia has finished last in the 14-team SEC each of the last three years, and the numbers have been trending downward.
The Bulldogs’ GSR of 41 for the period that ended with the 2022-23 academic year followed marks of 59 and 54 in the previous two reporting periods, respectively. The GSR represents the percentage of athletes that graduated after entering school six years prior.
To put Georgia’s 41% mark into perspective, that placed 259th out of 260 Division I football programs. Only Texas A&M-Commerce, an FCS school located northeast of Dallas, finished lower.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution asked UGA for a response from football coach Kirby Smart. Instead, Georgia Athletic Director Josh Brooks issued a lengthy statement through a spokesperson.
The last line of the response acknowledged, “there is more work to be done to ensure that our vision is realized.”
Context is required whenever discussing the academic performance of college athletes, especially those that play high-profile revenue sports such as football and men’s basketball. GSR does not take into account whether individuals are transferring out of the program or turning professional with eligibility remaining. The Bulldogs’ football program certainly has been impacted in both respects in recent years. Just this month, Georgia has had 15 scholarship players enter the NCAA’s transfer portal, 18 players overall. It had 13 players transfer out last year. Meanwhile, far fewer have come into the program via the portal.
Also, the Bulldogs have had 25 players taken in the NFL Draft the last two years. However, only nine of those were underclassmen. At least one of those underclassmen – linebacker Nakobe Dean – is a student in excellent standing (reported 3.5 GPA) and he returns to UGA each spring to continue his pursuit of a mechanical engineering degree.
GSR does not take such idiosyncrasies into account. Academic Progres Rate (APR) has a formula that does, and that is the metric that UGA prefers. However, the Bulldogs aren’t markedly better in APR relative to their peers.
Their latest mark of 965 (essentially 96.5%), which concluded with the 2021-22 academic year, ties for 125th among Division I programs. That ranks 10th in the SEC. Alabama and Ole Miss, which also send a lot of players to the NFL, are tied for first in the conference at 995 in the latest report.
GSR is more harsh. The last Georgia football players to count toward this year’s metric enrolled in the 2015-16 academic year. Smart was introduced as the Bulldogs’ head coach on Dec. 6, 2015, so he would have had control of all the players who signed in the 2016 recruiting class.
In a response to the AJC, a UGA spokesperson said the Bulldogs lost 34 football players during the four-year “cohort” that encompassed freshmen enrolling from 2013-16. The school says Smart inherited 61.7% of those players, while 38.3% came in after he started. At least four of them completed their degrees last spring, which was outside of the GSR’s window, the school says.
UGA said that Smart is a leading proponent of the athletic association’s initiative to encourage and facilitate former football players’ return to campus to complete their degrees regardless of how much time has passed since their initial enrollment.
“We have worked hard to be thoughtful and intentional about implementing strategies that will hopefully lead to better GSR outcomes,” Brooks said in his statement to the AJC. “But it should be made clear that GSR is not the most reliable indicator of our student-athletes’ academic success. Our efforts are not limited to a six-year window. Graduation, along with providing targeted, differentiated and informed support for our student-athletes continues to be the goal.”
There is no denying Georgia’s good work on the football field. No program has been more successful over the last three years than the Bulldogs. Georgia won national championships in 2021 and 2022 and had a chance to become the first three-peat champion in modern football history before falling as the nation’s No. 1-ranked team to then-No. 8 Alabama 27-24 in the SEC Championship game on Dec. 2.
That dropped the Bulldogs’ record over the last three years to 41-2, with both those losses coming at the hands of the Crimson Tide. Afterward, Alabama was elevated to No. 4 in the final College Football Playoff rankings and will play No. 1 Michigan in the Rose Bowl in a College Football Playoff semifinal. Georgia (12-1) fell to No. 6 and will play No. 5 Florida State in the Orange Bowl, but with no chance to contend for the 2023 national championship.
As for Alabama, the school has been beating Georgia in the classroom as well. The Crimson Tide has finished considerably ahead of the Bulldogs in the last seven GSR cohorts examined. Alabama was second in the SEC this year at 93% and has averaged 87% since 2016-17.
UGA’s average over the same period is 51.2%. The Bulldogs were last in the SEC all of those years except for two; in 2019-20 they were 12th (71%) and 2017-18 when they were 13th (58%).
As for its peers in the state, Georgia consistently lags behind archrival Georgia Tech and occasionally finished behind Georgia State and Georgia Southern. Tech football has finished ahead of the Bulldogs each year going back to the 2014-15 academic year, when Georgia edged it 73 to 72. Since then, the Yellow Jackets have averaged 85.25% in GSR, compared to UGA’s 57.5%. Georgia is 7-1 against Tech on the football field in that same span.
Meanwhile, Georgia State football’s GSR has been better than Georgia’s each of the last six years and Georgia Southern football’s was better in four of the last six.
School 2014-15 ‘15-16 ‘16-17 ‘17-18 ‘18-19 ‘19-20 ‘20-21 ‘21-22 ‘22-23
Ga. Tech 72 78 82 86 87 88 85 88 88
Ga. State n/a 50 33 60 74 79 81 82 74
Ga. So. 55 59 63 50 67 67 64 69 70
Georgia 73 60 53 58 64 71 59 54 41
To this point, the data discussed here has been all about Georgia football. To their credit, the Bulldogs fare much better academically when it comes to all 19 other NCAA-sanctioned sports in which they participate (equestrian is not recognized). In 2020, UGA athletics established a department record for GSR at 87%, which it lauded on its website. And in 2013, the school tied Vanderbilt for the No. 1 spot overall in the SEC at 83%.
At an athletic board meeting in September, faculty athletics representative David Shipley, a UGA law school professor, proudly reported that Georgia athletes achieved the highest cumulative grade-point average in school history (3.20) for the 2022-23 academic year that ended in June.
That prompted Brooks to proudly proclaim: “We have an athletic and academic powerhouse.”
For football, though, that extends only to the field of play.
- Why we’re doing this story: The NCAA posted the latest Graduation Success Rate (GSR) data for all its members on its website on Dec. 6. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s coverage of the football team includes all aspects of the program including details of its academic performance.
- How we’re doing this story: After noting that that the Bulldogs’ football program ranked 259th out of 260 Division I schools that field teams in the 2022-23 reporting window for GSR, a deeper look was done into the numbers and what they mean, including perspective with Georgia’s peer programs and others in the state. The AJC reached out the Georgia for its comment and insight.
- What else you should know: All of the data provided herein is public information available on the NCAA’s website, which annually reports and ranks both GSR and APR (academic progress rate).
