NCAA plans to see if coaches make grade
Report would track graduation rates
OXON HILL, Md. – The NCAA will be keeping score on how seriously a coach takes graduation.
The organization said Saturday it will move ahead with plans to create an Academic Progress Report for coaches, one that could be posted on the Internet for all to see by summer of 2010.
“The point is to shine some light on coaches’ performances and to bring some accountability to it,” said Hartford University president Walt Harrison, chairman of the NCAA’s Committee on Academic Performance. “They’re not the only people who should be held accountable, but they are a very key part of the chain.”
The NCAA already has an APR for schools, which was introduced four years ago and is used to penalize teams whose athletes consistently perform poorly in the classroom. The same formula would be used for the coaches’ APR, although coaches with low scores would be faced with stigma instead of sanctions: Schools looking for a new head coach might be more reluctant to hire someone near the bottom of the rankings.
“It could have a modest influence,” Penn State president Graham Spanier said. “Realistically, wins and losses weigh most heavily on a coach’s reputation.”
For coaches who have been in one place for a long time, the APR will be simple to calculate. Mike Krzyzewski’s APR, for example, will be the same as the one for the Duke men’s basketball team.
The math will be trickier for those who have bounced from school to school.
Another time-consuming part of the planning process will be compiling a list of all coaches in all sports – something the NCAA doesn’t have. Harrison’s committee hopes to present a prototype version of the coaches’ APR Web page to the NCAA later this year.
“It’s kind of like a lifetime batting average,” Harrison said. “It doesn’t tell you everything about how a hitter’s done, but it gives you a rough guide to their success. … We think of it as a general guideline that would be helpful to the public and to the presidents when they’re looking at coaches.”
In other news on the final day of the NCAA Convention:
•The organization plans to create an oversight committee to deal with commercialization, keeping with concerns expressed throughout the week about the exploitation of athletes for commercial purposes. The NCAA, for example, still isn’t happy that CBS Sports last year revamped its college fantasy game by using names and stats of individual players.
“It’s a murky issue,” said Spanier, chairman of the NCAA’s task force on commercialism. “Almost everybody has an opinion on it.”
•The NCAA downplayed a report from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a health-advocacy body that again called for the organization to stop accepting alcohol advertising during game broadcasts. The CSPI’s report found that 12 percent of the commercials aired during last year’s Final Four were beer ads.
NCAA spokesman Bob Williams said the ads fell within the current NCAA guidelines that limit alcohol advertising to one minute per hour, not counting ads aired by local stations that are beyond the organization’s control.
“About every six months they come out with a study that says we’re not holding to our policy or something else,” Williams said, “and each time it’s simply not true, it’s a misrepresentation, and this time is no different.”
As for the prospects of a full alcohol ban, Williams said: “It’s been looked at by the executive committee. It continues to be looked at, and the decision is to keep the policy the way it is.”