Teams fail to get the grade

BY Gavin Chanin

Bruin Sports contributor

gchanin@media.ucla.edu

The NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate has struck a little bit
closer to Westwood as two fellow Pac-10 schools are slated to be
penalized next year for their low scores.

Arizona and Arizona State are among the seven universities that
will lose scholarships over the next year after not meeting
academic standards, according to an update issued Thursday by the
NCAA.

The update covers eight universities not included in the
NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate, which was published on March
2.

Arizona will lose 1.17 of their scholarships for baseball and
three scholarships for football due to low scores.

Arizona State will lose two men’s basketball
scholarships.

Both schools posted APR scores well below the NCAA threshold of
925. The Arizona baseball team scored a 865, while football came in
at 882. Compared with other NCAA teams in the same sport, this
places these two programs in the first to 10th percentile
range.

Arizona State basketball scored a 843 (first to 10th percentile
range).

“I think (the APR) is going to change the face of
intercollegiate academics,” said Rocky Larose, the associate
athletic director of Arizona. “It’s affecting the way
coaches look at recruits, and it’s affecting the way athletic
departments go about their academic plans.

“It’s going to have a huge impact.”

Arizona, despite being affected by penalties, has remained
relatively optimistic about the effects of the APR.

“Every time you lose scholarships it has an effect, but I
feel pretty confident that we can overcome this and move
forward,” Larose said. “I think it’s all for the
best.”

UCLA currently has three teams under the NCAA threshold:
football, men’s basketball and women’s gymnastics.
However, the three teams will not be sanctioned because of NCAA
rules which stipulate that there is not a large enough data pool to
provide an accurate assessment of the teams at this time.

UCLA Associate Athletic Director Petrina Long believes APR is
one of a number of academic standards the NCAA is implementing that
will be beneficial with time but may cause problems in the
immediate future.

Long cites the fact that NCAA President Myles Brand, formerly
the president of Indiana University from 1994 to 2002, comes from
an academic background. Long thinks Brand is trying to implement
broadscale changes to the NCAA’s academic structure,
resulting in some testing she deems “frivolous.”

“It just makes us jump through hoops and interact with
students (in) different ways so that we can meet (the NCAA)
formula,” Long said.

“The APR has a number of glitches,” Long added.
“We have schools in our conference that take people who
didn’t even meet minimum NCAA requirements.”

Five other schools were also penalized in the NCAA’s
latest release. All five, in addition to Arizona State and Arizona,
were appealing their scores to the NCAA and therefore were not
included in the NCAA’s initial report.

Northern Arizona University, San Diego State University, San
Jose State University, Texas A&M University and the University
of Kansas were all penalized for various sports.

San Jose State was clearly hit the hardest. The school will be
forced to give up scholarships for four sports: men’s cross
country, baseball, football and men’s soccer.

All sanctioned schools are required to formulate a plan to
improve their scores and face more severe punishments if
improvements are not made. This includes indefinite scholarship
reduction, recruiting restrictions and exclusion from postseason
play.

According to Long and Larose, respectively, UCLA and Arizona are
currently in the process of formulating these plans.

To see all the APR records, check out the NCAA Web site at
NCAA.org.

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