The NCAA recently approved two measures designed to improve its athletes’ classroom performance by tying freshmen eligibility and team postseason participation to grades.
College basketball, with more reliance on true freshman than most sports, might be affected more than the others.
Effective for the 2015-16 school year, an incoming freshman will need a minimum 2.3 grade-point average in high school in order to play in college games during his or her first year. The current requirement is 2.0.
Teams also must have a four-year Academic Progress Rate average score of 930, which represents a 50-percent graduation rate, in order to compete in the postseason, including bowl games for football. There will be additional penalties, as well. This hard-line rule will be gradually phased in over the next few years. The current four-year rate is 900 for postseason eligibility.
According to the NCAA, 43.1 percent of the incoming freshmen who played men’s basketball in 2009-10 wouldn’t have qualified for Division I competition under the new GPA standard, compared to 15.6 percent of all incoming athletes. During the same time, 35.2 percent of freshman football players wouldn’t have been eligible. Those athletes still would have qualified for financial aid and been able to practice, according to the NCAA.
With the improved APR standard and penalties, 99 men’s basketball teams last year would have suffered penalties, including failing to qualify for the postseason, with Connecticut, the national champion, among them.
“It made perfectly good sense to have students successful in the classroom as well as on the court,” NCAA President Dr. Mark Emmert said.
Local coaches said they are in favor of the new standards, though they pointed out that college basketball isn’t the only sport affected.
“Every college coach should remember that we work at institutes of higher learning, and that you’ve got to perform in the classroom,” Georgia coach Mark Fox said.
Meeting the APR standard has been problematic for local college basketball teams. The APR is a four-year measurement designed by the NCAA to track a student’s progress toward graduation. Students who leave school early and aren’t in good academic standing will negatively affect a team’s score. The men’s teams at Georgia Tech and Kennesaw State, for example, failed to meet the minimum standards in the past and were punished by a loss of scholarships.
Under the new academic redshirt rule, students eligible to practice -- but not compete or travel -- would need a 2.0 GPA in high school core courses, most of which must be completed before the player’s senior year. A student who falls between the 2.0 and 2.3 standards would still be able to receive financial aid for the first academic term. With the exception of a medical condition, he or she wouldn’t be eligible for another redshirt year.
Within that change, the NCAA also has proposed increasing the sliding scale for eligibility, citing this example: A 1000 SAT score would require a 2.5 high school core-course GPA for competition and a 2.0 high school core-course GPA for practice. The SAT score for the required 2.3 GPA hasn’t been announced. The details of the sliding scale are being finalized, according to the NCAA.
Players who meet the grade standard for practice, but not competition, must pass at least nine semester hours or eight quarter hours during their first collegiate academic term to keep their financial aid for the next academic term.
“We are supposed to be about educations, and it gives the guys as youngsters, at 14, who may not have been taking their studies seriously, a game plan that they can follow,” Tech’s Brian Gregory said.
The NCAA says the new standard is less punitive than the old “partial-qualifier” standard, which took away a year of eligibility on the back end of a student’s career unless he or she graduated within four years. The new rule allows them four more years of participation after the academic redshirt year.
“We’ve got to get to the point where we kids get prepared,” Georgia State coach Ron Hunter said. “We shouldn’t eliminate kids; we should get them prepared and a redshirt year might do that.”
It’s similar to the old NCAA rule that made all freshmen, no matter their academic history, ineligible for competition.
Those who watch the NCAA closely support the intent of the new rules.
“We’ve promoted the old standard of a first year of ineligibility to get acclimated to campus and academics,” said Jason R. Lanter, president of The Drake Group, an NCAA watchdog organization. “The way the system is set up they are not an integral part of the academic side of the university community.”
With the academic redshirt year, Hunter said he would like to see the NCAA increase the number of men’s basketball scholarships from 13 to 15. That would allow schools, in cases where an excessive number of players in a class might need the extra year to adjust academically, to have enough quality upperclassmen to play and compete.
Emmert said the NCAA will likely monitor all aspects of the academic redshirt clause closely, including whether practice and film room allowance needs to be reduced, to make it more effective.
“This is about getting young people a chance to get their sea legs under them academically,” Emmert said. “If the pressures of practice and film and weight room and all of that continue to be an obstacle, we will have to address it.”
Commissioners of local conferences and local basketball coaches, Kennesaw State coach Lewis Preston and Gregory among them, say they shouldn’t have many future issues with the APR. However, they are preparing for the new rules to ensure they graduate students and maintain postseason eligibility.
Kennesaw State this summer prepared a risk-analysis survey for each sport to give coaches a snapshot of where their teams are in regard to an SAT-to-GPA ratio.
“We’re trying to find a happy balance as to what a KSU student-athlete is,” said Steve Benton, Kennesaw State’s assistant athletic director for student-athlete success services.
How might the new standards affect recruiting? Will a coach take a chance on a student who may not be able to play as a freshman?
The coaches said they would take it on a case-by-case basis.
“The landscape is changing so much,” Fox said. “Every kid deserves an opportunity; not every kid can fit in at every school.”
Preston said he would use the risk-analysis survey, as well as sit down and talk with his athletic director and others, to ensure an athlete will be given everything necessary to succeed academically, which supports the purpose of the changes.
“[Put] a system of checks and balances in place where during that year he can be around the program and understand the whole culture of being a student-athlete, as opposed to one over the other,” Preston said.
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