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 is a relatively small amount of data, there's one thing that seems a little disturbing — based on its own standards.

A perfect score is 1000, and teams that fall below 925 start to face sanctions. That score equates to a 50% graduation rate. The national average for basketball over the last four years has been a whopping 928. It's the worst performing sport by a country mile. UCLA averaged a 968 in men's basketball, which is in the 80th-90th percentile in the sport.

The worst-performing women's sport over this period has been bowling (seriously, stop snickering) with a score of 941. Nationally, 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 UCLA sports performed in the latest report, click here.

Chart from NCAA