Higher APR's and postseason bans are a step in the right direction, but tweaks are needed

The news that had the college athletics world buzzing on Thursday was that the NCAA Board of Director's had unanimously voted a measure that would implement postseason bans -- for bowl games in college football and postseason tournaments in college hoops -- for teams with a four-year APR score of less than 930. The cutline was previously at 900. The timetable for implementing the new rule will be determined in October.

There are a number of examples of programs that would not have been eligible for this year's tournament had the new rule been in existence this season, but the most glaring is national champion UConn, whose four-year average had fallen to 893 as of the end of the 2009-2010 season.

In theory, this is a good thing.

The NCAA is requiring schools to take responsibility for the academic performance of their students. Making a life-changing sum of money as an athlete is a difficult thing to do -- as Jeff Goodman outlined earlier this week, five of the 24 McDonald's all-americans in the Class of 2002 are still in the NBA, and that doesn't include Lenny Cooke -- which makes it all the more important for these student-athletes to be more student and not solely athlete.

The problem is that the APR is imperfect.

I'll point you in the direction of two terrific columns on the subject. The first is from Goodman earlier today, where he breaks down how the budget differences between the BCS conference schools and the low-major programs put the smaller schools are a huge disadvantage. The biggest schools have a team of tutors and an academic support staff to keep their players eligible. The smaller schools do not.

The second column is from Dan Wolken of The Daily, who perfectly breaks down the problems with the complexity of the APR. I'm not going to pull quotes from it, just go read it.

I'll had another issue that will undoubtedly arise -- the increased APR requirement will increase the amount of academic fraud in college sports. When you incentivize test scores and academic performance, you also create an added incentive to cheat. Just take a look at what happened with Atlanta's public schools. With bowl games and NCAA Tournament appearances hanging in the balance, you don't think that there are coaches out there who are willing to look the other way -- or, in many cases, order -- their academic support staff to make sure that these players get good grades, regardless of the consequences or the actions necessary to improve team GPA?

As with the proposed rule changes in recruiting, a higher APR shows that the NCAA is making an effort to take a step in the right direction.

That's good.

But its not perfect.

Yet.