Last week’s report where the NCAA honored 712 different teams throughout the country laid the groundwork for today’s broad release of the NCAA’s Academic Progress Report that effectively takes a scholarship away from NC State’s wrestling program.
You can access NC State’s specific report by clicking here.
* NC State is the ONLY school in the entire Athletics Coast Conference to be penalized with the loss of a scholarship in any sport.
* Additionally, N.C. State joins East Carolina, Gardner-Webb and UNC-Greensboro as the only schools in North Carolina penalized for failing to meet the NCAA standard for academic progress.
* NC State’s football and basketball APR’s are each ranked last among the Wolfpack’s Big Four rivals (Wake, Duke, UNC-CH).
On the positive side:
* Coach Sidney Lowe has worked hard to significantly improve the basketball program’s APR in a very short amount of time. Despite losing Andrew Brackman and Cedric Simmons to professional careers and losing a bench player to a career-ending health condition, the Wolfpack’s Basketball APR ranks in the top 80th to 90th percentile amongst all NCAA Basketball programs.
Football is an acceptable 50th to 60th percentile despite being impacted by the high turnover that plagued Chuck Amato’s tenure in Raleigh. We expect Coach O’Brien’s impact to gradually move football’s APR into even higher territory in the future.
Expect reactions to this will be ‘split down party lines’ within NC State’s fan base.
* The ‘status-quo brigade’ will be ‘fine’ with State’s performance claiming that it is ‘good enough’ while downplaying its importance as ‘not that big of a deal’. For example, the poster known as ‘modlin’ on Pack Pride’s message boards says, “Aside from that, our scores look pretty good.” Translation – “Aside from (the fact that we could be consider performing the worst in the entire ACC and got penalized with the likes of ECU and Gardner-Ebb), our scores look pretty good.”
* The ‘wish we were better brigade’ will surely note the deficiencies in NC State’s performance when compared to others.
For those that are interested, this link will take you to all of the NCAA’s penalties which include the following:
Baseball: LSU, UNC-G, Tennessee
Football: Kansas, Washington State
Men’s Basketball: ECU, Kansas State, Purdue, Seton Hall, UAB, Colorado, UNC-G, South Carolina, Tennessee,
Wrestling: NC State, WVU, VMI
Other related entries on the APR:
-N&O:NCAA penalizes ECU basketball team
