The Temple football team received some good news, and a warning, from the NCAA on Wednesday afternoon.In its annual report on the Academic Progress Rate (APR) of its members, the NCAA issued a “public warning” to the Owls to improve their classroom performance -- or they could face severe penalties in the future. At the same time, the report confirmed that Coach Al Golden’s squad has regained the nine scholarships that it lost last season.
How could one report send two different messages?
Because this was the first year in which the NCAA imposed “historical” penalties, those based on multi-year data and trends of individual teams. Previously, the APR penalties were based solely on the year-to-year academic performance of those teams.
Put more simply, the Owls lost nine scholarships last year because their APR score (837) from 2003-04 and 2004-05 was almost 90 points below the penalty cutoff.
This year, they improved their APR enough to pull their three-year score up to 858. That was more than enough to avoid scholarship losses, but it wasn’t high enough to avoid an “Occasion-One” warning from the NCAA.
Warnings are given to any team that fails to post a multi-year APR score of 900. Further penalties can be assessed if the Owls fail to reach 900 within the next three years, though the NCAA also takes a team’s APR improvement into account.
Those further penalties can include practice restrictions and, the most extreme possibility, banishment from postseason play. But the Owls won’t have to worry about anything if they continue to show improvement in the classroom.
Baseball Penalized. While the football team received good news, the Temple baseball team lost 1.17 scholarships due to its low APR score. That’s a big number – the maximum penalty, in fact – for a team that had its worst-ever season in 2006.
Coach Rob Valli’s squad was hurt not only by its subpar performance in the classroom, but also from a significant amount of player turnover after Valli replaced Temple legend Skip Wilson.
With an APR score of 892, the Owls are well within range of meeting the penalty cutoff next year. But they also might be subject to an “Occasion-One” warning in the future. The only reason they avoided public reprimand this year is because the NCAA makes a statistical exception for teams with fewer members.
The so-called “squad-size adjustment” also gave a reprieve to the Temple men’s basketball team, which posted a three-year score of 908, as well as men’s soccer (886) and golf (914).
Next year, the squad-size adjustment will be eliminated, meaning that -- sooner or later -- Coach Fran Dunphy’s team could lose scholarships if it doesn’t improve its score to 925.
All of Temple’s women’s teams surpassed the APR penalty cutoff this year.