Louisville Men's Basketball Posts Another Perfect APR Score

As with most things the NCAA does, the APR is super dumb. If it deserved the time, I would have thought of a non-teenage girl insult, but it does not.

The intended purpose of the APR is to measure how scholarship athletes are performing term by term throughout the school year. Teams that don't make the 930 APR threshold are subject to sanctions.

Here's part of an explanation of how scores are calculated:

Each student-athlete receiving athletically related financial aid earns one retention point for staying in school and one eligibility point for being academically eligible. A team's total points are divided by the points possible and then multiplied by one thousand to equal the team's Academic Progress Rate score. Example: A Division I Football Bowl Subdivision team awards the full complement of 85 grants-in-aid. If 80 student-athletes remain in school and academically eligible, three remain in school but are academically ineligible and two drop out academically ineligible, the team earns 163 of 170 possible points for that term. Divide 163 by 170 and multiply by 1,000 to determine that the team's Academic Progress Rate for that term is 959.

It sounds like a decent enough idea, except that there are major, major flaws which make the entire thing dangerously unfair.

The most notable among those flaws is that teams are penalized for having players transfer, regardless of their reason for doing so. Student athletes who do choose to transfer are counted towards the "incomplete" portion of the total score. Teams are also penalized when players declare early for their sport's professional draft and then don't complete their schoolwork for the semester they were enrolled in.

It's super dumb.

Regardless, the APR is a real thing (as any Connecticut fan can attest to), and appears to be here to stay for the foreseeable future. That being the case, let's look at how all the Louisville sports fared in the latest release of scores.

Baseball - 977
Field Hockey - 987
Football - 924
Men's Basketball - 995
Men's Cross Country - 1000
Men's Golf - 947
Men's Soccer - 958
Men's Swimming - 979
Men's Tennis - 967
Men's Track (Indoor) - 988
Men's Track (Outdoor) - 961
Softball - 989
Women's Basketball - 953
Women's Cross Country - 986
Women's Golf - 1000
Women's Lacrosse - 974
Women's Rowing - 979
Women's Soccer - 980
Women's Swimming - 991
Women's Tennis - 993
Women's Track (Indoor) - 991
Women's Track (Outdoor) - 988
Women's Volleyball - 982

In all, six Louisville programs (including men's basketball) posted perfect scores for the 2011-12 academic year. The football program - whose 924 total is the worst in the Big East and would have been in the worst in the ACC - posted a single-year score of 971. The program's overall score is still being dragged down by the Kragthorpe years, which infamously led to the loss of two scholarships a couple of years ago.

If you feel like doing more research (and God, why wouldn't you?), the NCAA has a nice little APR search tool you can use.