Dog Bites Man: Patriot League APR Rates Are Awesome

It shouldn't be much of a news item, really, but as the NCAA released their Academic Progress Rate numbers this year it was no surprise to see Patriot League schools all over the honor list.

Gushes the press release, "For the fifth consecutive year, Yale University had the most teams (24) recognized, followed by Dartmouth College (22) and the University of Pennsylvania (20). By conference, the Ivy Group had the most number of teams honored (135), followed by the Patriot League (90) and the Big East Conference (70)."

Today, the NCAA released the full data for their APR numbers; not only the numbers from last year, but the four-year averages which the awards are based. Let's take a moment to look at the numbers for football and men's basketball for the Patriot League - and then compare them to the rest of Division I athletics. (more)

Just to give the NCAA's APR numbers some context, APR scores are based on a perfect score of 1000, or a 100% rate of athletes that are both progressing towards graduation and remaining academically eligible To compute this, roughly, take every eligible athlete on your team, and multiply that times two. Then add the number of athletes that are getting retained by the school together with the number of athletes that are academically eligible. The ratio, multiplied by 1000, is your APR.

The cutoff for "bad things happening" from the NCAA is generally 925, which roughly corresponds to a 60% graduation rate (ultimately) - though I've seen no scientific evidence to prove this is the case. Still, a rate of 1000 is the ideal, and what every school should strive towards. And the Patriot League, unsurprisingly, is near the top.

Here are the numbers for Patriot League Men's Basketball:

Note the five perfect scores of 1000 for men's basketball in the 2009 academic year, including Lehigh's.

To put this in context, you can probably count on one hand the number of kids in basketball who either dropped out or were academically ineligible in the entire league. That's extraordinary for a Division I school. And when you compare this to the graduation rate of all of Division I of somewhere between 60% and 70%, that's really something to crow about.

Football also offers plenty of good news:

Again, to put this in perspective, in the Patriot League every football athlete in 2009 averaged 98% of the total available points for retention. And again, compare that to the 944 of the rest of Division I. That's something to just sit back, look at the Patriot League and say, "Yes, Virginia, we're obviously doing something right."

How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA's Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

By now you've seen the results. In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm. Perhaps it was Penn's 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago . Or maybe it was Princeton's 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth. Or maybe it was Yale's shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend. The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League. But it's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled. Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season. The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League. W

UMass 21, Lafayette 14, halftime

Are you watching this game? UMass had this game under control until about 3 minutes in the second quarter, and then got an interception, converted for a TD. Then the Leopards forced a fumble off the return, and then converted THAT for a TD, making this a game. It's on CN8. You really should be watching this.

Examining A Figure Skating Rivalry: Tonya and Nancy

It must be very hard for a millennial to understand the fuss around the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding figure skating scandal in the run-up to the 1994 Olympics. If you're of a certain age, though - whether you're a figure skating fan or not, and I am decidedly no fan of figure skating - the Shakespearean story of Harding and Kerrigan still engages, and still grabs peoples' attention, twenty years later. Why, though? Why, twenty years later, in a sport I care little, does the story still grab me? Why did I spend time out of my life watching dueling NBC and ESPN documentaries on the subject, and Google multiple stories about Jeff Gilooly , idiot "bodyguards", and the whole sordid affair? I think it's because the story, even twenty years later, is like opium. The addictive story, even now, has everything. Everything. The woman that fought for everything, perhaps crossing over to the dark side to get her chance at Olypic Gold, vs. the woman who

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