NCAA penalizes N.C. A&T football program for poor academic progress : News-Record.com : Greensboro & the Triad's most trusted source for local news and analysis

The NCAA released its annual Academic Progress Rate public report Wednesday afternoon, and N.C. A&T's football program was penalized for poor performance.

The Aggies will lose 6.3 scholarships and be restricted to five days and 16 hours of practice per week (a penalty of four hours).

Of all the men’s and women’s sports programs at Division I schools in North Carolina, only A&T football and Gardner-Webb wrestling were penalized.

The NCAA report and accompanying penalties are based on APR data from the 2005-06 through 2008-09 academic years. The Aggies were coached by George Small and Lee Fobbs during those seasons.

A&T hired current coach Alonzo Lee on Jan. 16, 2009. Lee was not a member of the Aggies coaching staff for any of the penalized seasons.

Eligibility, retention and graduation figures for athletes are factored into an APR score. A perfect score is 1,000, and teams that score below 925 can lose scholarships.

A&T’s football score was 843, which ranks in the bottom 10 percent of the nation’s 243 football-playing Division I schools.

Wake Forest men's basketball coach Jeff Bzdelik's former team, Colorado, scored 897 and had one scholarship revoked. Bzdelik coached Colorado for two of the four seasons covered in the APR report.

Read more in Thursday's News & Record and in our e-Edition at www.news-record.com/enews.

kurts12gauge

June 9, 2010 - 7:05 pm EDT

More racism. Great.

Nunyabusiness

June 9, 2010 - 9:43 pm EDT

I never realized that holding african-american players to the same standards as white players was racist.

June 9, 2010 - 11:11 pm EDT

Thats because you, as a privileged white person, dont understand what its like to go to school in the black community. Knowing that, you cant possibly expect us to perform like the kids at GDS

Panacea

June 9, 2010 - 11:13 pm EDT

Neither did I.

Racism has nothing to do with this.

vlmwest

June 9, 2010 - 11:35 pm EDT

I'm sorry...did you expect them to be coddled BECAUSE they were black? I'm so tired of people blaming it on racism. TAKE SOME RESPONSIBILITY....NO EXCUSES!

PS: Gardiner-Webb, predominantly white. Want to try your argument again there buddy?

Citywatch

June 9, 2010 - 7:25 pm EDT

Setting standards for student athletes is anything but racist. It's too bad the new coach and current team has to suffer but this is an important message that atheletes shouldn't be used and tossed aside after four years. A worhtless degree is just that...worthless.

BTW, the school with the top APR - RUTGERS is a large state school, not some elitest private institution.

RIGHT

June 9, 2010 - 7:57 pm EDT

Lets put them all in the academically gifted program, works for me.

OmnipotentEinstein

June 10, 2010 - 6:57 am EDT

The NCAA needs comes to the quick realization that American colleges and universitities whom are under need to completely overhaul the entire system.
The fact is you have far too many athletes on scholarship who are unqualifed to be on the college level under any circumstances.
The only way to correctly remedy this is too completely eliminate 100% of athletic scholarships and go to a complete walk-on system "pay to play" meaning they must qualify to be admitted on academics first and foremost before they can even have the honor to participate in the sports programs.

We know for a fact that the 1200 or more American colleges and universities under the auspices of the NCAA guidelines and rules are all guilty to one extent or another of allowing those student athletes who are unqualified academically to slip in the back door using athletics and this creates the scenarios of fraud.

Several years ago UT at Knoxville saw 5% of its football players graduate. This is clearly fraud but it goes on everywhere. The NCAA must begin to clamp down on admission fraud just because of athletics and the best most efficient way to do this would be to completely eradicate all forms of athetic scholarship and force walkons.

In forcing walkons only who will be required to pay their way like 99% of all the other students making things more equal and fair for all instead of the getting the free ride mooch and then not performing up to par in the classroom making the school and NCAA look bad.

In addition 50% of all academic scholarships need to be eliminated as there is far to much politics involved in these also, but the real problem for years that has been festering is the athletic admission fraud that only manifests itself into a failure in the classroom.

revans

June 10, 2010 - 11:06 am EDT

First and foremost, shame on the News & Record for its continued Jerry Springer mentally when it comes to reporting information about A&T; anything that is negative and degrading we will write it when comes to A&T. Secondly, shame on North Carolina A&T for not providing the resources neccessary for the Athletic Programs to be successful. This has nothing to do with Admissions and this continued Elitest attitude about academics and Admission standards. I agree we need standards but no University or College should have the mission of only admitting or creating the Master Race of Students.

North Carolina A&T fails all its athletes because the Chancellor and Board of Directors continually allow and provide their Athletic Department with limited resources, which is the problem for most HBCU's (Historically Black Colleges & Univeristies). All their scholarships are based on In-State tuition, 90% of the Athletic programs have poor recruiting budgets, 80% of A&T sports are exremely under staff and poorly paid, and the Acdemic support is poor because the people who genrally run these areas have limited resources and vision. In addition, most of these people never include the Coaches or ask what they think is the best way to deal with today's Student-Athlete.

Thus, for those of you who are in denial and continually blame admissions and think Athletes get special treatment, please wake up; it is much more to it and its not that simple. Any student whether at A&T or where ever has a responsibilty to attend class, study, learn time management skills, and most of all mature. There are plenty of great students who do not make it through college for whatever reasons. A&T must invest in their programs, the Athletic Director must place people around him who are visionary and from what I here the people around him are not, with that being said that means the results will be the same if the Chancellor, Board of Trustee, and the Athletic Director continue to poorly fund or provide these sports no resources to be successful. This has been a long standing problem for A&T.

sir william

June 10, 2010 - 3:47 pm EDT

They should be penalized for their "on field performance". SAD!!!!!

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