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BY Gavin Chanin

Bruin Sports contributor

gchanin@media.ucla.edu

The NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate has struck a little bit closer to Westwood as two fellow Pac-10 schools are slated to be penalized next year for their low scores.

Arizona and Arizona State are among the seven universities that will lose scholarships over the next year after not meeting academic standards, according to an update issued Thursday by the NCAA.

The update covers eight universities not included in the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate, which was published on March 2.

Arizona will lose 1.17 of their scholarships for baseball and three scholarships for football due to low scores.

Arizona State will lose two men’s basketball scholarships.

Both schools posted APR scores well below the NCAA threshold of 925. The Arizona baseball team scored a 865, while football came in at 882. Compared with other NCAA teams in the same sport, this places these two programs in the first to 10th percentile range.

Arizona State basketball scored a 843 (first to 10th percentile range).

“I think (the APR) is going to change the face of intercollegiate academics,” said Rocky Larose, the associate athletic director of Arizona. “It’s affecting the way coaches look at recruits, and it’s affecting the way athletic departments go about their academic plans.

“It’s going to have a huge impact.”

Arizona, despite being affected by penalties, has remained relatively optimistic about the effects of the APR.

“Every time you lose scholarships it has an effect, but I feel pretty confident that we can overcome this and move forward,” Larose said. “I think it’s all for the best.”

UCLA currently has three teams under the NCAA threshold: football, men’s basketball and women’s gymnastics. However, the three teams will not be sanctioned because of NCAA rules which stipulate that there is not a large enough data pool to provide an accurate assessment of the teams at this time.

UCLA Associate Athletic Director Petrina Long believes APR is one of a number of academic standards the NCAA is implementing that will be beneficial with time but may cause problems in the immediate future.

Long cites the fact that NCAA President Myles Brand, formerly the president of Indiana University from 1994 to 2002, comes from an academic background. Long thinks Brand is trying to implement broadscale changes to the NCAA’s academic structure, resulting in some testing she deems “frivolous.”

“It just makes us jump through hoops and interact with students (in) different ways so that we can meet (the NCAA) formula,” Long said.

“The APR has a number of glitches,” Long added. “We have schools in our conference that take people who didn’t even meet minimum NCAA requirements.”

Five other schools were also penalized in the NCAA’s latest release. All five, in addition to Arizona State and Arizona, were appealing their scores to the NCAA and therefore were not included in the NCAA’s initial report.

Northern Arizona University, San Diego State University, San Jose State University, Texas A&M University and the University of Kansas were all penalized for various sports.

San Jose State was clearly hit the hardest. The school will be forced to give up scholarships for four sports: men’s cross country, baseball, football and men’s soccer.

All sanctioned schools are required to formulate a plan to improve their scores and face more severe punishments if improvements are not made. This includes indefinite scholarship reduction, recruiting restrictions and exclusion from postseason play.

According to Long and Larose, respectively, UCLA and Arizona are currently in the process of formulating these plans.

To see all the APR records, check out the NCAA Web site at NCAA.org.