Division I is involved in a compelling debate about coaches’ links with student-athlete academic performance. Few people deny the coach’s responsibility for steering players toward graduation, but more ponder the accountability in doing so.

At issue is whether the Academic Progress Rate, which measures the real-time academic performance of a team and is designed to be a reasonable predictor of graduation success, could be attached to coaches. In other words, should the team’s APR become the coach’s as well, and follow him or her from job to job?

The Division I Board of Directors thinks that might be a good idea and has asked the Committee on Academic Performance to figure out if it’s feasible. Board members concerned that coaches with poor academic track records are continually hired and rehired believe the APR or similar metric tied to a coach would be a beacon for athletics directors – and college presidents – when making hiring decisions. The presidents also liked the idea of holding coaches accountable for their team’s academic performance in a more public manner.

But the Division I CAP must wade through a bevy of complicating factors before making recommendations, including:

• Should coaches be responsible for the academic performance of student-athletes they did not recruit?

• What if a coach inherits a team that experiences a large number of transfers after the coaching change? Is he or she responsible for the resulting drop in the APR?

• Should the Graduation Success Rate also be considered when assessing a coach’s academic success?

• Is the coach the only person responsible for the academic performance of student-athletes, or are other athletics or institutional personnel also involved?

• How would the formula for the metric be changed to accommodate any of these issues?

• How would such a metric be monitored and used?

Among the CAP's recommendations might be listing the head coach on a team’s four-year APR report that is available annually online. Jack Evans, chair of the CAP subcommittee on data collection and reporting, said he wouldn’t be opposed to that method as long as the listing was precise about who was coaching the team at what time. For example, if a school made a coaching change after year one of a given four-year APR report, the document would note the previous coach’s tenure and that of his or her predecessor for the remainder of the four years.

“Doing it that way would clearly indicate that neither coach is completely responsible for the totality of the numbers that are there,” Evans said. “But each coach would acquire at least some ownership.”

As Evans sees it, part of the problem with tying the APR to a coach is that it may not adequately measure the commitment of an individual coach to academic performance – and it wasn’t intended to do so.

“The APR system was intended to be a picture of the graduation success of a particular program, that’s all we claim for it. It can never be a perfect measure of the academic commitment of a coach,” Evans said. “It’s not even a perfect measurement of the academic commitment of the student-athletes on that squad, but it’s a lot better than what we had before.”

The Board has appointed Oregon State President Ed Ray to chair a subcommittee including CAP Chair and Hartford President Walter Harrison and other CAP members to assess the academic-accountability issue for coaches.