GUEST POST: In modern college sports, is it possible to measure teams' academic progress?

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I’m guessing a lot of your sports media diet today is going to be centered around the College Football Playoff bracket, or the various bowl matchups, or that Notre Dame besmirched the tradition and honor of playing in the breakfast pastry ritualistic sacrifice football game.

I’m going to try to counterprogram that a little bit, by sharing this freelance story from Miles MacClure, a freelance reporter based in Northern Michigan. MacClure got into the weeds about a metric you might have read a little bit about last night, as bowl executives frantically tried to figure out what 5-7 teams might be able to accept a bowl bid.

Let’s talk about the APR. I’ll turn it over to Miles.

by Miles MacClure

On Nov. 11, 4-6 Akron faced Kent State in a late-season matchup. With two games to go, the Zips still had a chance at six wins — which, for most teams, equates with bowl eligibility. But Kent State’s 42-35 overtime victory was ultimately meaningless for the Zips’ postseason hopes; Akron played this season knowing all along it was ineligible for a bowl game due to a low academic progress rate (APR) score. 

Such bans are rare; the last FBS team to face one was Idaho in 2012-13. But a sub-par stretch for the Zips starting in 2021 landed them in the NCAA’s crosshairs, as a coaching change, a wave of transfers and academic performance issues stood in the way of the team meeting the score it needed to go bowling.

For about 20 years, the NCAA has used APR, along with the graduation success rate (GSR), to track teams’ academic progress. APR rests on two key metrics: player retention and academic eligibility. Teams earn one point for every player they retain and another for every player who remains academically eligible. (For example: If a player transfers while eligible, the team gets one of two points. If a player leaves while academically ineligible, it gets zero points.) A team’s total points awarded are then divided by points possible and multiplied by 1000. 

According to the NCAA, the current four-year average APR score for Division I football teams is 964. But another number is more relevant for programs like Akron: 930. If a team’s APR dips below that threshold, the NCAA might issue penalties, including practice time reductions, scholarship reductions and postseason bans. 

A high rate of transfers can sink a team’s single-year APR score. After Deion Sanders cleaned house at Colorado, its APR score dropped to 930. But the Buffaloes didn’t meet the same fate as Akron; postseason bans for low APR scores are assessed on a four-year average score, giving a team time to recover after an outlier season. 

Still, D-I football has changed significantly since the advent of APR, and the transfer portal (installed in 2018), unlimited transfers (first permitted in 2024), changes in scholarship limits and the legalization of NIL payments have all affected scores. In an era when change is far more common than consistency, is Akron’s ban the start of a troubling trend, the sign of the NCAA remaining wedded to metrics that no longer fit the moment? Or is there still a space for measuring academic progress within a system that’s increasingly professionalized and transient?

“ When you look at, it's very simple. You get two points. One for retention, one for eligibility. If a student passes all of their classes, you don't lose anything,” said Ron Moses, the deputy athletic director at Old Dominion University who also serves as the vice chair of the NCAA’s committee on academics and eligibility. “So when people get mad at it sometimes I'm just like, well, if the student just passes their classes, it doesn't hurt the institution. It only hurts when the student leaves the institution and they did not pass their classes.” 

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In a campus-wide email in May, Akron president R.J. Nemer addressed the postseason ban and pegged the low APR score on a high number of transfers during the 2021-2022 academic year after the school fired coach Tom Arth. Nemer claimed it had been an outlier season that resulted in a low single-year APR of 885. The next year, Akron’s APR was 905, and in 2023-2024, it rebounded to 920. (Akron’s postseason ban is based on its average score of 914 from 2020-2021 through 2023-2024.) 

Emails from Akron leadership obtained through a public records request offer a window into managing a team with a low APR score. 

In January 2025, senior associate AD Jackie Wallgren sent an email to coach Joe Moorehead and encouraged him to cancel the scholarships of three players who had poor grades, noting the risk of losing more APR points. (Akron ultimately did not cancel any of the players’ scholarships.) In the same email, Wallgren mentioned a fourth student who had a 0.74 GPA, but Akron wasn’t permitted to cancel his aid. 

Asked about those emails, a representative from the Akron athletic department told Extra Points that the school’s athletes are “provided with academic support throughout the semester, and they are aware that becoming academically ineligible could result in the loss of their athletic scholarship.”

“When poor academic performance is paired with entering the transfer portal, exhausting eligibility, or quitting the team, the likelihood of academic success decreases even more,” the Akron representative added. “Given the severity of the potential consequences (i.e., bowl bans and practice reductions) for the remaining academically eligible student-athletes, we sometimes have to consider the team's welfare and revoke scholarships from students who are not performing academically.”

In another email referencing the bowl ban, first-year AD Andrew Goodrich commented in August about the penalties handed to Michigan for the Connor Stalions sign-stealing case. “The most frequent question I've received from fans and donors alike,” Goodrich wrote, “is, ‘why did the NCAA cite the inherent lack of fairness to punish the current students, who didn’t have anything to do with their school’s violation, when they didn’t recognize that same concept in our APR case?’”

Akron’s sanctions didn’t come out of the blue. In the year before the bowl ban, the team received a practice reduction penalty for its low APR. And though the transfer portal era has exposed flaws in the APR metric, every team except a handful has passing numbers.

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The Graduation Success Rate (GSR) was introduced in 2002 to account for transfers, tracking students who complete a degree within six years of entering school. Unlike APR, teams aren’t penalized for low GSR — but the two metrics are intertwined; according to the NCAA, a 930 APR roughly correlates to a 50 percent GSR. (In practice, however, this doesn’t always add up. Take Georgia: For the past several years, its APR has floated between 960 and 979, but its GSR numbers have been low. For the 2017 cohort, Georgia’s GSR was 47 percent. The 2016 GSR was even worse, at 41 percent.) 

GSR can be important for a school’s finances. Institutions can earn a share of the NCAA’s academic performance fund, which distributed $83.5 million this year, by achieving a GSR of 90 percent or higher. They can also earn money from this pool for an APR of 985 or higher. But these metrics perhaps matter most in a micro, rather than macro, sense. Moses, the Old Dominion deputy AD and NCAA committee on academics and eligibility vice chair, laid out the most basic argument for the importance of APR: Transferring too many times is detrimental to a student’s education, both in terms of earning credits and putting together a cohesive education. “ Every time you transfer, a student's going to lose a certain amount of credits. They don't go in apples-to-apples, so that's really tough when you have students on their fourth or fifth school,” he added. 

Moses said athletes transferring from ODU are nearly always in search of better NIL deals, but they pay less attention to academic outcomes and to the fact that multiple transfers can restrict their options for majors. Transferring schools three or four times and attempting to major in a STEM field, or even journalism or business, presents hurdles. “Everybody's talking about, oh, they got to do what's best, they got to get paid,” he said. “And I'm like, ‘Well, are you paying attention to what happens when this student finishes?’” 

According to the NCAA, only 9 percent of football players who graduated in 2022-23 majored in a STEM field, compared with 28 percent of the general student population. Ten percent of football players that year graduated with degrees in communications, twice the rate of the general student body. But to link these numbers to transfers and NIL would be a simplification; the NCAA doesn’t provide data comparing the majors of students who transfer with those who do not, and it’s possible athletes, on average, have shied away from STEM and toward communications since long before the transfer portal was instituted. 

As Matt Brown wrote for this very newsletter in 2019, a perfect or near-perfect APR score doesn’t indicate stellar academic performance, it just means that all student-athletes met the minimum academic eligibility requirements and that few student-athletes transferred out of the program. 

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Since APR and GSR were introduced, both numbers have climbed steadily upwards. The NCAA attributes the increase in graduation rates to requirements that athletes make progress towards completing their majors. Athletes are required to complete 40 percent of their major requirements by the end of their sophomore years, 60 percent by the end of their junior years and 80 percent by the end of their senior years. “Requiring student-athletes to not only be enrolled full-time, but to be enrolled in major-applicable coursework, has likely played an important role in increasing the graduation rates of Division I student-athletes,” Massillon Myers, an NCAA spokesperson, wrote in an email to Extra Points.    

“The APR rate — holding teams accountable for ensuring athletes are both eligible and retained, also likely led to increased emphasis, monitoring and available support for student-athlete academics, which would be positively related to the grad rate climb,” Myers wrote. 

There have been other positive consequences: Over the past 20 years, NCAA data has shown, the graduation gap between Black and white FBS football players has closed. In 2002, the GSR for Black FBS athletes was 54 percent, compared with 76 percent for white players. In 2024, Black FBS athletes had a GSR of 82 percent; for white FBS athletes, the number was 94 percent. 

At ODU, Moses said, conversations about transferring have become routine when helping students map out their futures. “ We really try to roadmap, like what does it look like if you transfer,” he said. “ So we're starting to have a lot more of those conversations.”

Currently, there isn’t public-facing data that tracks academic outcomes for individual athletes, but that’s slated to change thanks to the “Graduation Passport,” a data portal the NCAA is developing. “This dataset would capture the term-by-term enrollment patterns of Division I student-athletes (including school attended) and would capture whether the student earned their bachelor’s degree within a 6-year window, regardless of their pathway to earning the degree,” Myers wrote. 

In the spring of 2026, Myers added, the NCAA will be able to analyze the 2024-25 academic data and for the first time should have a large enough pool of multiple transfers to allow it to compare their outcomes to non-transfers and first-time transfers. 

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On Nov. 19, the NCAA released GSR data for athletes who began school in 2018. Akron’s football team’s 2018 GSR came in at 67 percent, the same as the 2017 cohort, potentially hinting at a rebound in forthcoming APR data, which will come out in May. (The school’s GSR for all athletes who enrolled in 2018 was 84 percent.) The only FBS team with a lower GSR score was Georgia, coming in at 58 percent.

But Akron’s time in the NCAA’s crosshairs may not be over. Even if the Zips manage a perfect APR of 1000 for 2024-2025, their four-year average would still be just 927.5 — placing them once again under the penalty threshold. It’s unclear if the NCAA would waive a penalty if Akron demonstrates an improved score, or if another penalty will be assessed. 

“Our football team has made significant strides in improving its APR. … It has been a true team effort on our campus to make sure the team is set up for success,” the Akron representative told Extra Points. “It’s also important to remember, our football team has consistently had a roster of academically eligible players each year. APR is a metric that measures academic performance, but it is not the only indicator. Our team has consistently improved its APR over the past several years, and we remain optimistic that this trend will continue.”

In this highly commercialized era of college sports, it’s easy to forget academics. The majority of college football players aren’t pocketing millions from NIL deals, and most won’t make it to the NFL. The value of graduating with a degree remains high, and the NCAA’s role in holding schools accountable for keeping athletes on track academically remains crucial. APR, despite criticisms and the fact that it was born in a wholly different era of college sports, still provides a standard for teams to abide by. 

Miles MacClure is a freelance journalist who writes about culture, politics, tech, agriculture and sports.