Arkansas basketball avoids APR penalties

John Pelphrey's Arkansas basketball team's multi-year Academic Progress Rate dropped two points to 886, but its single-year score for 2008-09 was a 933 and helped the Razorbacks from being hit with scholarship and loss of practice time penalties from the NCAA.

— Arkansas’ men’s basketball program has avoided NCAA penalties for its low multi-year Academic Progress Rate thanks to a one-year increase of 178 points in its most recent score.

Arkansas scored 886 for the latest four-year period according to statistics released Wednesday — after an 888 last year — which put the program in jeopardy of being hit by historical penalties that could have included loss of a scholarship or reduced practice time because the NCAA has set an APR benchmark multi-year score of 925.

But Arkansas improved its APR score for men’s basketball to 933 for the latest one-year reporting period, the 2008-2009 school year, after its previous one-year score was 755.

“That sent a message to the NCAA that our improvement plan is working and that we’re taking our responsibilities with regard to APR very seriously,” Arkansas Athletic Director Jeff Long said.

Arkansas also avoided contemporaneous penalties because it didn’t have any basketball players for the latest reporting year who were academically ineligible when they left the program, what the NCAA refers to as an “0 for 2.”

Arkansas’ multi-year score for the latest report still dropped two points because the year that rolled on was not as high as the year (2004-2005) that rolled off.


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“Basketball’s single-year improvement is significant and very important to us,” Long said. “And we feel that’s a strong sign that we certainly are moving in the right direction with our student-athletes in men’s basketball.

“Not only with regard to APR, which is important because it’s a public barometer of our success, but because we feel like we’re making progress with the student-athletes, and we’re helping them understand the importance of working towards their degree and hopefully ultimately earning a degree from the University of Arkansas.”

Historic penalties are meant to embarrass and punish what the NCAA identifies as chronic under-performing programs, but in the case of Arkansas men’s basketball, the NCAA stated no penalties were assigned “due to the team’s demonstrated academic improvement and favorable comparison based on other academic and other institutional factors.”

Long praised Arkansas’ basketball players and coaches, and the academic support staff, for implementing a plan for improving the program’s APR by stressing higher achievement and progress towards graduation.

“We’ve got a lot more work to do, there’s no question about that,” Long said. “But we’re working very hard to achieve in this area, and our student-athletes are responding.”

The NCAA’s APR scores are tabulated using a formula for how well schools retain and maintain eligibility for student-athletes.

For the second year in a row, Arkansas had 18 of its 19 sports exceed the APR benchmark score of 925 for the multi-year reporting period, but attention has been focused on basketball’s low score because it’s a high-profile sport threatened by penalties.

Football, which is the top fund-raising sport for the athletic department, had a multi-year APR score of 930 and a one-year score of 956.

Women’s gymnastics led all of Arkansas’ sports with a 995 multi-year score, followed by women’s golf (994) and soccer (989), and men’s cross country (982) and outdoor track and field (980).

It’s the first time in six years the women’s golf team didn’t have a perfect score of 1,000. Its one-year score was 969 because of a player transfer.

Arkansas teams scoring 1,000 for the latest one-year period were women’s gymnastics, swimming and diving, tennis and volleyball, and men’s tennis.

“You look across this country, there are a lot of schools that have lost scholarships or lost practice time,” Long said. “We’re proud that we’ve not had that here, and we’re going to work very hard to avoid that.”

The 755 score for basketball for the 2007-2008 reporting year resulted in part because six seniors on that team didn’t graduate after John Pelphrey’s first season as coach.

Pelphrey praised the academic performance of his latest team while speaking with the media two weeks ago after hiring Brett Nelson as an assistant coach.

“I think our culture has completely changed academically,” Pelphrey said. “We’ve got some guys who are really overachieving right now.”

Arkansas’ basketball multi-year APR score will continue to be low for at least the next couple of years because it’s weighed down by the 755 from the 2007-2008 year.

“The 933 was an important year, and we hope to have a another good year next year,” Long said. “As we continue to move forward, we anticipate having higher scores come on than will be rolling off.

“But this is definitely a process ... It’s a change in the way we approach academics, not only in our men’s basketball program, but throughout our athletic department.”