 TOLEDOROCKETS.NETYour source for information on Rocket Football! |
TOLEDOROCKETS.NETYour source for information on Rocket Football! |
|
By Brian Nowicki The NCAA has announced that the University of Toledo football program has not met the standards of the Academic Progress Rates (APR) and will have scholarship restrictions because of it. The report says that Toledo will lose 6 scholarships and 3 initial scholarships. What does this all mean? The NCAA has a limit of 85 student-athletes on scholarship and a limit of 25 kids that can sign with a school in a given recruiting class. With these scholarship reductions, Toledo would be forced to a limit of 79 student-athletes on scholarship and a limit of 22 kids that can sign with a school in their recruiting class. This all sounds a bit confusing, right? Questions come to mind right away. When does this start? How long will it last? How will it affect Toledo? To answer these questions I talked to University of Toledo Assistant Athletics Director for Compliance, Brian Lutz. First I found out that Toledo has just 77 overall scholarships this year (2005-06), so none of our current scholarship student-athletes are affected by this. The 6 scholarship reduction counts against Toledo this academic year, and we are actually working with 8 less than the NCAA maximum number of 85. The second piece to this is that we are restricted to just 22 initial scholarships for 2006-07. However, on February 1st the Rockets signed 23 players to national letters of intent. According to Mr. Lutz, this will not effect any of those 23 signed players though. "With the 23 initials we have for 2006-07, we could possibly be forced to defer one penalty until the 2007-08 academic year," said Brian Lutz. "We will monitor the initial eligibility of these 23 incoming student-athletes to determine whether we will be required to defer this scholarship." So over the next few days you will read in newspapers and on websites that Toledo is losing 6 scholarships and 3 initials, but don't be alarmed. Toledo has already enforced the current penalties, with a possible exception of the one initial scholarship. Lutz said, "next year, we will again submit our eligibility information to the NCAA to determine if there will be any scholarship penalties next year. After next year, the NCAA will have a historical penalty structure in place which gets increasingly punitive," said Lutz. "We have already enforced the currently penalties, again with the exception of the one initial scholarship, so we will again evaluate our APR points for this academic year at the end of the summer term to determine our cumulative score." So what is Toledo doing to improve their APR score so they will not have to deal with penalties in the future? Mr. Lutz touched on four key points. First there will be an increase in financial support for tutorial assistance. There will also be an increase in financial support to allow freshman to enroll in the summer semester, prior to initial full-time enrollment. Lutz said, "this will allow them to get acclimated to a college campus sooner, and also allow them to get off to a good start academically." A third point is that they will spend efforts to ensure that students in their final semester(s) are making appropriate progress toward their degree. The final point is a formal academic recovery plan. "We will have a formalized academic recovery plan in the upcoming weeks, which we feel will serve as a gameplan for improving our APR," said Mr. Lutz. In all, four current MAC schools (Toledo, Western Michigan, Buffalo, and Northern Illinois) have received penalties in the form of reduced scholarhips for football because of the APR. Temple, who will join the MAC in 2007, also received penalties for football. They received the loss of 9 scholarships, the most of any Division I school. At the same time, not one single school from a BCS conference received a penalty for football. 23 Division I schools (8 Division I-A and 15 Division I-AA) received penalties from the NCAA, but none of them were from a BCS conference. Is that a coincidence or is something fishy there? ESPN columnist Pat Forde doesn't believe it is a coincidence. "This is a little like the old 1980s compliance joke, The NCAA is so mad at Kentucky, it's going to give Cleveland State three more years' probation," said Pat Forde. He went on, "if this trend persists, it will only deepen the caste system in college athletics. Hopefully, the NCAA will study this data and make some determinations about the apparent academic disparity between castes." Forde added, "here's one wild guess as to a root cause: Money." Mr Forde also said this, "so here is the Catch-22 the NCAA presents to its smaller, weaker members: You're competing against schools with 20 times the dollars and manpower that you have -- and if you don't keep up with them academically, we're going to take away scholarships and make it even harder to compete athletically." Pat Forde makes some very good points. If the NCAA wants to judge all schools the same way, then they need to spread the revenue around to all Division I-A schools so that a school like Toledo can spend more money on academic counselors and tutors. Regardless, the NCAA is taking the APR very seriously and schools need to find a way to comply. I like the steps that Toledo is taking to improve their APR score. One can look at this whole thing and realize that because of the APR, student-athletes at Toledo are being given more opportunities to succeed in the classroom, which will strengthen their chances of succeeding after college. Have a question or comment for Brian? Email |