More bowl-bound Division I football programs are meeting the NCAA’s minimum acceptable academic standards than last year, according to a study released Monday.
The report by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida found that of the 64 teams headed for bowls, 73 percent earned recent Academic Progress Rate scores of above 925, which means they would not be subject to NCAA penalties.
In 2006, only 63 percent met the cutoff.
The APR measures athletes’ progress toward graduation. The study used the NCAA’s APR data from the 2004-05 and 2005-06 school years.
“While there’s still work to be done, football student-athletes in Division I are doing better academically than in the past,” NCAA spokesman Erik Christianson said.
Richard Lapchick, the institute’s director and the report’s primary author, raised concerns about the ongoing gap between the graduation rates of White and Black football players. But he also noted that Black football players are graduating at a greater rate than Black students as a whole.
