NCAA Football A 10 Basketball

Temple may be right there for the worst athletic department with a (sort of) division 1-A football team. Their latest APR report card (PDF) has the football team headed for scholarship reductions by next season. The baseball, basketball and even the golf teams got passes this season with the "squad-sized" adjustments.

Still, that's just a couple programs that are having academic issues. It's not like the entire athletic department is in trouble with the NCAA.

The NCAA announced yesterday that it has put the entire Temple athletic program on probation for two years and handed down other penalties for two violations that occurred in the Owls' sports program in the 2004-05 and 2005-06 school years.

Oh.

The big screw-up involved an apparently desperate tennis coach. He purposefully used an ineligible player for 9 matches in 2005.

The athlete, a midyear transfer, was allowed to compete under the name of an eligible player who had left the team. The NCAA reported that Hoehne, who had coached at Temple for seven seasons, even went so far as to mumble the player's name during pre-match introductions so as to not obviously identify him and requested that opponents skip the introductions.

Hoehne, to no one's surprise was fired after this came to light and the NCAA has effectively declared him unhireable by colleges for the the next seven years with a "show of cause" penalty. The Tennis team's sparkling 3-9 record for the season has been changed by the NCAA to 0-12.

The athletic department also didn't do much in the way of oversight in its financial aid distribution in 2004-05 and 2005-06. It turns out that 36 student-athletes were found to have used the money for book purchases to purchase books not needed for their classes. The purchases were generally for a girlfriend, other interests, or just to resell for cash.

Temple's president has issued a press release accepting the penalties and saying that it will never happen again. After his first season at Temple, basketball Coach Fran Dunphy (pictured right) has to wonder why he left Penn.

The NCAA released its Academic Progress Reports (APR) for every school and the teams for each sport. A total of 6110 teams are included. You can view each school's individual report (they are in PDF). The APR is supposed to be a rolling 4-year average, but the NCAA isn't at that point. This is only the third year so there are adjustments and leeway given to some teams. The grace period is granted only if they are showing that they are closing on meeting the magic number of 925 by the time the 4th year is reached. (The APR records started being kept in the 2003-04 school year.)

If a team is at 900 or so, they won't be getting penalized immediately. The penalties can range from warning letters, practice restrictions, lack of access to postseason competition, restricted membership and loss of scholarships for the teams that don't meet performance standards. Already, teams across various collegiate sports have been penalized with scholarship losses.

The BCS schools for football and basketball, generally are in good shape. Only a few programs are facing scholarship reductions. Many are close or have been warned, but scholarship reductions are rather limited. Some of the notable teams penalized after this latest report: