NCAA Makes It Official: No Reprieve For UConn Men

UConn is out of appeals. The process, due or not, has run its course. The men's basketball team will not play in the 2013 postseason.

The NCAA Committee on Academic Performance concluded its meeting Friday without making any changes in policies that were adopted last fall. UConn, by virtue of past Academic Progress Rate scores, falls short of the standards. This was UConn's last hope for a reprieve.

"[The committee] reviewed and reaffirmed our current policies and procedures regarding Academic Progress Rate data and implementation of academic penalties and/or postseason eligibility," said Walter Harrison, University of Hartford president and chair of the Committee on Academic Performance, in a statement.

"After discussion over several meetings, the committee concluded the current process is effective and achieves a careful and appropriate balance," Harrison said. "We expect to continue with these policies and procedures in the future."

Under the new standards and penalty structure beginning in 2014, schools will have to maintain a 930 APR over a four-year rolling average. Next year, schools will need to have a 930 over two years or 900 over four years. UConn, which scored an 826 for the 2009-10 academic year, was therefore eliminated as soon as the rules were adopted. The program scored a 978 for 2010-11, the year it won the national championship, but even a perfect score of 1,000 could not have offset the 826. School officials said their score for the just-completed 2011-12 academic year is at least as high as 978, but that data will not be announced and considered until next spring.

UConn, citing recent improvement, applied for a waiver, offering its own set of penalties, but the NCAA rejected it in January, and the Committee on Academic Performance rejected it on appeal in April.

"Warde Manuel and Susan Herbst still believe in the points we made," said UConn associate director of athletics Mike Enright. "We believe strongly they were valid; we believe it could have been done in a way so that scores from the 2011-12 academic year counted toward eligibility in 2013."

The CAP studied several proposals for using more recent scores to implement its penalties but found none workable. Some schools use trimesters, others quarterly sessions, so deciding when an academic year begins and ends complicated the process. Meetings in February and April produced no change.

UConn President Susan Herbst, athletic director Warde Manuel and coach Jim Calhoun have repeatedly asked the NCAA to use more recent scores rather than penalize current players for predecessors' subpar grades. No current UConn player was on the team that scored 826 in 2009-2010. Manuel and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy have said the NCAA unfairly applied its new penalty structure "retroactively."

Under the penalty, UConn's practice schedule will be limited to five days a week instead of the normal six, and "coaching activities" will be reduced from 20 hours a week to 16.

And the Huskies' 2012-13 season will end with the final game of the regular season in early March. Big East presidents voted to keep the Huskies out of the conference tournament in New York. The NIT, which is affiliated with the NCAA, will not invite UConn, and other minor postseason tournaments, which hope to maintain a working relationship with the NCAA and its members, are not likely to offer an alternative.

The Huskies have scheduled several high-profile nonconference games to help keep the program in the national spotlight. UConn will play Michigan State at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany on Nov. 9, will appear in the Paradise Jam in the Virgin Islands later in November and will play North Carolina State in the Jimmy V Classic at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 4 and Washington on Dec. 29 at either Gampel Pavilion or the XL Center.

Source: http://www.wsbt.com/sports/hc-uconn-apr-0714-20120713,0,5048242.story?track=rss

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