SPOKANE — Washington State University will lose eight football scholarships for failing to satisfy the latest NCAA academic progress standards, the school said Tuesday.
Two of those scholarships will apply to this academic year, while the remaining six are factored into the 2008 recruiting class, the school said.
“The NCAA has an appeals process but at this point we felt it was best to accept our penalties and move the football program forward,” athletic director Jim Sterk said.
The NCAA on Tuesday released a nationwide report that recommended possible scholarship losses at nearly 150 college teams in all sports. The WSU football program was the only sport among the four Division I programs in the state — including Washington, Eastern Washington and Gonzaga — to face potential scholarship losses.
The 2007 Academic Progress Rate report showed that 13 of WSU’s 17 sports programs are in compliance with NCAA guidelines. Men’s basketball, baseball and volleyball are not, but, unlike football, do not face scholarship losses.
The report contains data for the previous four academic years and assigns each sport a corresponding score.
Washington fared well in the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate numbers for the 2006-2007 school year that were released on Tuesday. Football and men’s basketball, as well as many other sports, were above the national average for that sport. Football had an APR score of 948, while basketball’s number was 943, both above the NCAA’s Division I goal of 925.
According to John Morris, Washington’s senior associate athletic director for compliance, the Huskies will not incur penalties in any sports.
“Of course we always want to be the best, and it would be nice to be number one in APR in all sports, but all in all we feel pretty good about it,” said Morris. “There’s always room for improvement, but none of our sports are at risk of having any penalties under the APR, and most of them are trending upwards in the last year or two. So all in all we feel pretty good about it.”
The APR awards two points each term to student-athletes who meet eligibility standards and remain with the institution. A team’s APR is the total points earned by the team at a given time divided by the total points possible.
WSU’s football team recorded a four-year average score of 916, missing the 925 (out of 1,000) NCAA benchmark. Teams falling below 925, which the NCAA said equates to a graduation rate of 60 percent, are subject to scholarship penalties.
In the case of football, the 2006-07 single-year score of 874 dropped the four-year average under 925. The previous three years produced APR scores of 916 (2003-04), 955 (2004-05) and 921 (2005-06).
The penalties mean that WSU’s football team is restricted to 22 new scholarships this year. Combined with continuing scholarships from previous years, it will have a total of 77 overall in the coming season — eight fewer than the 85 normally allowed to a top division football program. The Cougars are the only Pacific-10 school to lose football scholarships.
The Division I four-year average score was 928 for basketball and 934 for football. Among other Division I programs in the state:
n Eastern Washington was 940 for football and 898 for basketball.
n Gonzaga, which does not play football, was 965 for basketball.
Three other WSU sports did not reach the 925 benchmark — men’s basketball (905), baseball (921) and volleyball (923). But they will not lose scholarships because they did not have any players depart while academically ineligible.
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