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More APR and not much more room for football

May 11, 2017 by Mike Casazza

Hey, that’s good news! A collective 983 score is the best West Virginia has ever produced, which means student-athletes are doing their jobs in the classroom, and the roster of advisors and tutors are doing their jobs outside the classrooms. And though I don’t want to write a headline that could be read wrong — “Football nears bowl ban!” — I do want to talk about football.

The four-year score for football is 940. The punitive mark is 930. A year ago, WVU’s four-year score was 945. It was 942 the prior two years. The 2015-16 single-year score had to be low to sink the four-year score five points. (Aside: The math is hard and imperfect. You could do some elementary calculations and determine the single-year was 954 for 2014-15 and then 925 for 2015-16, but we can’t know for sure. For some reason, the NCAA doesn’t reveal single-season scores unless they’re perfect scores. There are also ways to retroactively boost scores, and that explains how men’s basketball has a perfect four-year score but wasn’t among the single-year perfect scores for the 2013-14 year.)

Anyhow, the 2015-16 score must have been low, but to reach the 930 mark, it’ll have to be low again. I don’t know if that’ll happen. Again, that’s hard to track because of privacy, but we know WVU suffered no academic losses for the bowl, the team team set the mark for the highest team GPA on Dana Holgorsen’s watch and there were 10 Mountaineers on the academic all-Big 12 teams. That’s part of the 2016-17 score, which we’ll learn a year from now. We know Steven Smothers was held out of spring football because of academics, but he was never labeled ineligible.

That said, 940 is the second-lowest score among Power 5 programs, a point above Florida State. As you know, everything is about recruiting, and though I don’t know how many kids are picking Indiana over WVU because the Hoosiers have a superior APR score, I do think it’s fair to imagine a coach telling that kid or any kid, “They’re getting close to 930 …”

Hitting 930 invites penalties, but it’s not an automatic postseason ban, and, again, WVU has work to do — or not do, I guess — to drop down there. The Mountaineers also have incentives to stay above 930. Holgorsen, for example, receives a $10,000 bonus for being between 930 and 949 and $20,000 for being above 950. But the assistant coaches? They’ve got plenty on the line. Their contracts contain this clause. (Yes, it’s crooked. Yes, it was sent to me that way)

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