After appearing to make some strong strides in the classroom when the NCAA released its last Academic Progress Rate statistics in May 2018, the Florida State football team's numbers took a nosedive when the latest report dropped on Wednesday.
For the 2017-18 academic year, FSU's single-year APR was 922 (out of 1,000). That is a dropoff of 44 points from the previous year.
And the Seminoles' multi-year APR, a four-year rolling score which is seen as the more important metric to determine a program's academic health, dropped to 936. That ranks lowest of any school in the Football Bowl Subdivision.
* Follow-up on FSU's poor APR for football and why it should improve
The NCAA requires a minimum multi-year score of 930 before a program faces any penalties or sanctions, so the Seminoles are still safe there. But they lag far behind every other program in the ACC.
Seven conference schools (Clemson, Duke, Boston College, Wake Forest, Louisville, Pittsburgh and Georgia Tech ) have multi-year APRs of 980 or above. Virginia Tech and Florida State are the only ones below 960, and the Hokies' 953 is 17 points higher than the 'Noles.
Florida State's multi-APR has been trending in the wrong direction for several years, although the Seminoles seemed to be turning things around last year when their single-year report shot up to 966. That was a huge improvement from the year before when they produced a 918.
According to the NCAA, the APR is designed to measure "eligibility, graduation and retention each semester or academic term" for every individual sports program.
Some of the factors that can hurt a program's APR include players becoming ineligible, failing to graduate on time and leaving school while not in satisfactory academic standing.
It was no secret during the end of former head coach Jimbo Fisher's tenure that FSU's academic performance was lagging. Shortly after he was hired in December 2017, Willie Taggart said he will place a much greater emphasis on academic performance going forward. (See related article: Taggart drawing cheers for FSU's improvement in classroom)
*** Click here to access the NCAA's APR database.
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