When the NCAA announced that Oklahoma State would lose a day of practice per week due to poor APR scores, we wrote a post wondering how Mike Gundy and his staff would work around the penalty. Turns out we can go ahead and wipe that one from the archives.
Oklahoma State announced Tuesday that it would indeed not be docked one day of practice per week after revising its APR score to meet the minimum threshold of 930, up from a 929.41 two-year average. How were the Cowboys able to do this? According to the announcement, Oklahoma State discovered that a student-athlete from the 1990's had recently graduated.
Why does a system that measures academic progress over the past two and four-year periods care what a student who started school a year and a half ago does? Great question. I don't have the slightest clue of an answer.
"Throughout this process the NCAA has been committed to having complete and accurate data," Oklahoma State senior associate athletics director for compliance Kevin Fite said in a statement. "We were provided a great deal of assistance in ensuring the information we were evaluated on accurately reflected our football team's academic performance, based on APR standards. When the additional point was discovered earlier this summer, the NCAA staff promptly re-evaluated our situation and added the point, which took us out of the penalty range."
We all know that the inmates run the asylum inside the NCAA. When the schools write the rulebook, it should not then surprise us when they also write the loopholes and cheat codes.