No NCAA Division I "power conference" program will miss postseason play for bad APR scores, but not every program went unscathed.
According to ESPN, the Oklahoma State Cowboys will miss out on about one day of practice per week for narrowly missing the Academic Progress Rate (APR) mark. For not achieving a 930 four-year or a 940 two-year average, the Cowboys will be practicing five days a week instead of six.
Their official score was 929.41, which rounds down to 929. If they had scored just 0.09 points higher, 929.50 would round up to 930, clearing them of any sanctions whatsoever. Oklahoma State plays in the Big 12, one of the five "power conferences" that earn far more money than all the others in Division I athletics.
"We have shown significant improvement over the last two years and we were able to demonstrate that we've taken strategies to address the areas where we were losing points. That's why we received partial relief from the standard penalty," Kevin Fite, Oklahoma State's senior associate athletic director for compliance, said in a statement.
Like a large number of athletic programs, Oklahoma State is improving its APR score as the NCAA annually raises the mark. Thanks to their upward trend, the Cowboys avoided a postseason ban this year.
"We are taking steps to ensure that our APR numbers improve moving forward," athletic director Mike Holder said in a statement. "We are accountable for what we do and, ultimately, we are here to serve our student-athletes and do our best to keep them on track to be lifelong contributors to society."
This year, Division I women's basketball, men's basketball, football and baseball all showed improvements, the NCAA reported in a news release. Since the APR was introduced a decade ago, the rate of student-athletes dismissed from their team for academic ineligibility has also declined.
"Ten years ago, the membership designed the APR to encourage student-athletes to stay in school and earn good grades. We are pleased to see that more and more student-athletes are doing that every year," NCAA president Mark Emmert said in the release. "The significant academic standards adopted by our membership help us support success in the classroom to the same degree that we support success on the playing fields."
Still, there are plenty of low-resource schools outside the power conferences struggling to work their way out of the APR penalty zone. Read more here.
