Men's Basketball Struggling Nationwide

The NCAA has used the Academic Progress Rate to measure the academic success of athletic teams for four years. Although that's a relatively small amount of data, there's one thing that seems a little disturbing -- based on their own standards.

A perfect score is 1,000, and teams that fall below 925 start to face sanctions. That score equates to a 50% graduation rate. The national average for men's basketball over the last four years has been a whopping 928. It's the worst performing sport by a country mile.

USC somehow managed to drag down the average with a score of 863, one of the most pathetic scores of any sport at any school in the nation. As mentioned earlier on this blog, three players turned pro in 2007 and decided not to finish the spring semester. USC has already absorbed the scholarship punishment, but fans have every right to be furious at Nick Young, Gabe Pruitt and Lodrick Stewart.

Nationally, the worst performing women's sport over this period has been bowling (seriously, stop snickering) with a score of 941. The "big three" men's sports have all done worse, but as you can see (in the chart above) football and baseball have at least started to make some progress. Basketball hasn't gone up by very much.

Don't believe anybody who tells you basketball is different because players leave early for the NBA ... there are only 60 draft picks, but many schools are left out of the NCAA's 65-team tournament. And no sport has more mid-week time commitments (and potential missed classes) than baseball and golf.

I'm not sure what's going on. Neither is the NCAA, which said it would address academic issues in men's basketball by creating a panel (expected to complete its work in October).

For more from the NCAA, click here.

To see a PDF breakdown of how USC sports performed in the latest report, click here.

Chart from NCAA.

Comments

[trojanman]

I wonder if SC's academic office just lost track on this issue '07. Hard to believe they could. But, especially Lod and Nick were high character guys, so I am surprised that they would intentionally do this to the school if the administration, coaching staff, and teammates had been on their butts to stay in class. A-Rose, did the school admin drop the ball here, or did Lod, Nick and GP really give the finger to us?