Courtesy of
The Higher Ed Watch Blog, they bring you the
Second Annual Academic Bowl Championship Series Standings.
Their Academic BCS formula starts with each football team’s four-class average federal graduation rate, which includes all football players who entered college between 1998 and 2001 and graduated within six years of initial enrollment. Football teams then earn or lose points based on the following:
(A) the gap between the team's graduation rate and the overall school's graduation rate.
(B) the gap between the team's black-white player graduation rate disparity and the overall school's disparity (it’s important to expose and penalize teams with significant achievement gaps)
(C) the team’s NCAA APR score in comparison to the median APR for all Division I-A teams. For a full explanation of their formula,
click here.
The standings for the BCS Top 25 for this season. For the second year in a row Boston College is #1, with Northwestern and Penn State close behind.. The first SEC team is Mississippi which is ranked 13; no surprise there. In 2007, the Oregon Ducks had a total of 8.35 points, and followed it up this year with an "impressive" 10.5 points. At least they are moving in the right directions. Which is less that can be said for teams like USC and Florida who actually scored less points than last season. I guess when you win football games like they do, no one really cares about academic standards.
From the Higher Ed Watch Blog: "In general, the Academic BCS scores were slightly higher than last year -- hopefully a sign that teams are paying more attention to the student part of student-athlete. The two most-improved schools are Brigham Young and Ohio State, which jumped by nearly 12 and 10 points respectively. The Buckeyes, however, still have a long way to go to join the elite academic football teams: Ohio State graduates only 49 percent of its football players and has a black-white graduation rate of 32 percentage points."
