Mean Green

The UNT men's basketball team will lose a scholarship today when the NCAA releases its annual Academic Progress Rate report, a source close to the situation has told the Denton Record-Chronicle.

The APR measures a school's ability to keep its athletes in school and eligible. Each team is also rated on an individual basis. There will be a story in tomorrow's edition of the paper that goes through the specifics of how the APR works, but the general formula is each athlete earns a point for remaining in school and another for remaining eligible. Programs are not penalized as long as they earn 92.5 percent of the possible points. Players who transfer out while ineligible are particularly costly for programs with smaller rosters because those programs lose two points on the basis of one player's actions.

UNT has already used three of the four scholarships it is supposed to have for its 2008 recruiting class. The fourth will now go unused.

UNT head coach Johnny Jones went on record when he announced his three-man class that includes Paris JC forward Eric Tramiel, Arkansas-Fort Smith point guard Dominique Johnson and Arlington Grace Prep forward Ben Knox that he believes he had addressed all of his team's needs in recruiting.

UNT essentially lost a spot it could have used on a high school player to develop for the future.

The tough part about the APR hit for UNT is that Jones does a great job of keeping the players who stick with him on track to graduate. Calvin Watson and Kendrick Davis graduated and a host of other players, including Ben Bell and Rich Young are about to earn their degrees.

The problem with the APR is that if a player decides to transfer and slacks on his academic commitment, he can hurt the program he is leaving. That turned out to be the case with the UNT men’s basketball team.

UNT did very well as a whole a year ago when all of its programs met the APR standards after the NCAA made its final adjustments. Tomorrow we will find out how the athletic department did this year.