From Kronborg castle, your gaze commands the narrow strait separating Denmark and Sweden. Turning landward, it is too easy to imagine the cloaked figure of Hamlet darting among the guards and parapets, fog swirling after his foot-falls, despite the passage of centuries, where he pursued a ghost and Marcellus observed that something was “rotten in the state of Denmark.” This article questions whether something is rotten in Alabama, via an analysis of its football program’s Graduation Success Rate compared to the school’s overall ranking.
I came about writing this piece as the offshoot of a larger work on which I am working on with @andrewwinn, one that looks at what actually happens to recruits in the Alabama football program. Obviously, one of the potential outcomes for student-athletes is that they graduate. That got me wondering…
To measure a football program’s academic performance, the NCAA has developed two metrics over the last decade or so: Graduation Success Rate (GSR) and Academic Performance Rate (APR). We’ve covered them extensively here at HLS and detailed explanations would, I think, distract from my point, which, I promise, I will get to shortly.
Suffice to to say, however, that these two metrics are used to gauge the academic performance of Division I (FBS) athletes in a manner that differs from the federal rates applied to other students due to the unique issues facing student-athletes, and football and basketball players in particular. Simply put, those students will transfer from one school to another for the opportunity to play ball. Under the federal rules, a school is penalized for that decision, whereas the NCAA metrics only penalize a player if they transfer when they do not meet academic eligibility requirements. The presumption is that a student-athlete in good standing will graduate.
I chose to use GSR versus APR for this quick study because it presents a sturdier platform, I think, upon which to gauge long term graduation trends. While APR is intended to present a snapshot of a program’s academic health and is the metric upon which the NCAA’s Academic Performance Program assesses penalties for non-compliance, GSR is focused on graduation rates over time, i.e. the federally-tracked six year cohort.
When you look at Alabama’s GSR over the years, and the NCAA makes data available going back to 2004-2005, you can see that they have dramatically improved their scores. In fact, “dramatically” is too weak a word. For example, for the 2004-2005 year, Alabama’s GSR was 39, based upon the 1998 cohort. Notre Dame’s was 98. In the most recent group, 2014-15, Alabama’s GSR is 86. Notre Dame’s has actually fallen to 93.
Alabama’s progress up the charts has been remarkable for its consistency. Of the eleven years graded, in only one did Alabama’s score drop from the previous year. Notre Dame has seen its GSR drop four times, year-to-year, in that same period. And when Alabama goes up, it goes up with a bullet: from 39 to 44 for 2005-06, to 49 for 2006-07, to 55 for 2007-08, to 67 for 2008-09. The Crimson Tide jumped from 69 in 2010-11 to 75 in 2011-12. Notre Dame’s GSR has never risen by more than one point, year-to-year.
When the University of California Athletics analyzed its teams GSRs, its Director of Athletics, Mike Williams, noted that “[i]t takes a while to move a four-year average, such as the GSR, and we recognize that.” Not at Alabama, Mike. Not at Alabama.
Something interesting, though, is happening to Alabama even as its GSR is rocketing upwards. The overall ranking of the University is plummeting. In doing the research for this piece, I came across a chart in the Washington Post that tracked the changes in US News and World Reports rankings over the years. You can find it here.
Currently, Notre Dame is ranked 18th in the nation. Alabama is ranked 96th, tied with FSU and St. Louis University. For 2014-15, Notre Dame was ranked 16th. Alabama was 88th. The year before that, Alabama was ranked 86th. The year before that, 77th. The year before that 75th. In 2010-2011, the last year for which data was provided, Alabama was ranked 79th. Notre Dame was 19th.
So what’s going on at Alabama? Well, for one, they’re graduating more players. In fact, they put an historic number of graduates on the field against Michigan State and have implemented a “graduation” helmet sticker, which is actually pretty cool.
They started from a laughably low score, 39, too. It’s relatively to make leaps from there. But almost fifty points?
Perhaps they’re just riding the wave of a general trend in public education, especially in the SEC, where money-making sports are insulated from the budgetary woes buffeting the institutions and academic programs. If academically rigorous programs are being hacked away and the football programs are getting gobs of money to improve their academic counseling, what do you expect the GSR to do? Alabama may be uniquely surfing that wave, though, as they are expanding at a time when many public schools are contracting overall. At LSU, the governor is threatening to cancel the season if Louisiana’s budget isn’t fixed.
Hating Hurricanes Since 1990.
Bayou Irish is a Jersey boy and Double Domer who fell under New Orleans' spell in 1995. He's been through Katrina and fourteen years in the Coast Guard, so we cut him some slack, mostly in the form of HLS-subsidized sazeracs. But, when he's not face down on the bar and communing with the ghosts of Faulkner and Capote at the Carousel Bar in the Hotel Monteleone, he's our man in SEC-land, doing his best to convince everyone around him that Graduation Success Rate is a better indicator of success than the number of MNC's won in the last five years.
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Anytime the title of an article contains a question mark, watch out! Have the guts to print something more than innuendo. If you know what the explanation is, state it. If you do not, print something else. You probably know that football player graduation rate and US News university rank are completely unrelated statistics, but yet that is the centerpiece of your slander. And yes, I am an ND alum who is proud of and contributed to our academic traditions. I also have children in the Alabama Honors College, though, so unlike you, I know exactly what it is that explains their academic trends. Hack job?
Anytime the last line of a comment contains a question mark, watch out!
I don’t intend to speak for the author, but while the football GSR and university USNWR are completely unrelated, it seems curious that they’d be moving in opposite directions, no? After all, they’re meant to quantify similar measures — namely, a population’s likelihood to graduate.
Also, libel is printed and slander is spoken. Do you have one of our staff members read you our articles daily? If so, give him/her my best regards.
Legal definitions aside, you somehow managed to decipher the point and have nothing meaningful to add to the discussion. And no, it is meaningless (and therefore not “curious”) for unrelated statistical measures to move in opposite directions. Anybody with an ND education should realize that, and should be above reliance upon misleading statistical manipulation to make specious arguments.
Hi Dad. Thanks for reading and commenting. I think I “printed” exactly what I was comfortable posting, which was that Alabama’s football GSR has sky-rocketed while at the same time the University’s overall ranking, which takes into account a billion factors, has dropped 21 spots. I’d also like to point out that I recognized their historic level of graduation and that they may in fact be doing better than the other guy. I used LSU as my stand-in for “the other guy.” I don’t see how a school’s overall ranking (via US News) is a ranking that can or should be disassociated from that of its football team.
Allow me to play devil’s advocate for a second: could the GSR jump also be a function of fewer Alabama players jumping to the NFL before graduation as well as a decrease in transfers? I seem to remember that one of the reasons APR was adopted was because GSR didn’t take such things into account.
I mean, I understand that the numbers are a bit outside the normal growth and progression, but I’m not sure we are taking everything into account here.
As long as they aren’t going full North Carolina here, more power to them for the jump.
That’s a good example of many things that could explain the statistics. Which is why I would have thought that a more balanced article would have considered or explored such potential explanations before jumping to the more sensational “something’s rotten” scenario.
I don’t see the post as sensational. Rather a starting point for discussion. Based on your previous comments, you seem to have more of an issue with the headline than anything else.
That may be true. The headline implies cheating. I believe that there may be several explanations for skyrocketing football player graduation rates at UA, but it would shock me if cheating is one of them.
One possible explanation is that by most objective measures, the recent academic progress at UA has been amazing. In fact, that progress was a recent feature in a New York Times article that describes how the influx of football money is lifting the entire University. From a nation leading number of National Merit Scholars (yes – even more than ND), to skyrocketing ACT and GPA averages, to state of the art facilities supported by rising faculty credentials, there is s lot going on at UA that has captured the attention of academic reviewers across the country.
I don’t know what explains the U.S. News results, but most everybody realizes how subjective and imprecise they are. To imply that such relatively small movements within the rankings is somehow statistically significant and representative of academic circumstances at the University is to fundamentally misunderstand the point and reliability of those rankings.
Ultimately, though, I wonder why an ND focused board would be interested in this discussion absent the aura of cheating? Which makes me question the author’s motives. It’s curious, that’s all.
Cheating is actually rather far from my mind. I found the disparity in trends very curious, which is why I wrote what I wrote. If you must know (I must! I must!), what I believe is going on is that Alabama is focusing on graduating their players. They are likely dumping a huge amount into tutoring, academic support, and special classes. I can’t know that for certain because of FERPA. I disagree with you that a 21 point drop in the national rankings is somehow statistically insignificant. You will note, too, that I noted AL’s infrastructural improvements and contrasted them with LSU. Why wouldn’t a site like this not be curious about the number one program in the country and interested in their trends?
Fair enough. I would agree that there is a significant focus at UA on graduating players, and there are significant resources available to back that up. The 21 point US News drop is statistically significant, though, only if the overall ranking score itself reflects some level of precision or statistical significance with respect to the specific parameter of interest – and in this case (likelihood of graduation), it does not. For example, one of the single biggest weights on the Alabama US News score is level of alumni financial support. They are near rock bottom and dropping in that category. There are other examples where the overall score is unduly suppressed by arguably tangential factors. When it comes to more direct measures of student academic qualifications and academic success, though, the trend has been sharply up for the past several years. So to make the type of comparison you are trying to make, you have to look behind the overall average score, because the average reflects and is skewed by issues unrelated to your thesis. When approached that way, the football player trends correlate much better. Ultimately, I think Alabama is riding the crest of the same wave that ND rode, when football dominance yielded huge fringe benefits in the academic side of things, helping to make ND what it is today.
But with ND, that football dominance yielded huge contributions, right, which AL is not getting, right?
Very true. Historically, I assume that relates to Alabama’s low national rank as a state in all things economic, as reflected in the UA alumni base. But that too is changing, with more than half of incoming freshmen coming from out of state in recent years, thanks to the outrageous scholarship pool available for out of state students. Presumably that eventually results in a more affluent donor base. I also think that out of state ratio is unique among SEC schools.
It might, but that remains to be seen. I understand that a lot of state schools, especially in the SEC, are making a huge push to attract out-of-state students because of the enormous disparity between the tuition they charge. At LSU, in-state tuition and fees are about $9,000. Out-of-state is almost $28,000. Alabama is $10,000 for in-state and $26,000 for out-of-state. Thus, the schools can offer “big” aid packages to out of state students and still “make money” on them, which they are. Out-of-state students may ultimately be more inclined to “give back,” but that may be on a school by school basis. I don’t know that Louisiana’s poor economics are to blame for that as I don’t think LSU has much, if any, of a giving-back culture. It was made almost deliberately so, to be funded by the state as a foil against Tulane and the wealthy and on and on. I know many successful LSU-educated lawyers and doctors who “give back” by buying football tickets. Well, the ones our legislators aren’t using, anyway.
But what are they majoring and getting degrees in? I’d love to know that… are they graduating with marketable skills?