Eduardo Almaguer/ Sports Director
In a press conference that Pete Garcia held today, the executive director of sports and entertainment hinted that the FIU men’s basketball may soon be slapped with a postseason ban for the 2013-14 season for sub par academic progress rate (APR) scores.
The press conference came in the wake of former Head Coach Richard Pitino’s departure to the University of Minnesota.
The likely ban stems from the poor scores the team achieved during former Head Coach Isiah Thomas’ three-year tenure.
The NCAA draws the cutoff mark for penalties at 900. The maximum score is 1000.
In the 2009-10 season, the team had single-year 900 mark, lower than the previous year’s 933. In 2010-11, Thomas’ players registered a dismal single-year 833 score. The single-year 2011-12 scores have not been released, but they’re expected to be below 900.
APR is a metric created by the NCAA to gauge how much progress institutions are making in graduating their student-athletes. The number is derived from two factors, worth one point each: eligibility and retention.
In other words, players gets their two points if the athlete meets the GPA cutoff mark and if they stay in school that year. Points are then tallied up, divided by the maximum amount of possible points (determined by number of athletes on the team) and multiplied by one thousand to reach the final score.
Garcia said he’s been in contact with an APR specialist who alerted him that basketball was “heading down the wrong road” and was part of the reason FIU fired Thomas last season.
In the press conference, Garcia acknowledged the possible ban and he said that in the search for a new men’s basketball coach, he’s going to make all candidates very aware of the dilemma like he did with Pitino.
“Richard [Pitino] inherited that and Richard did a tremendous job of doing everything he could to fix that,” Garcia said. “He’s leaving us in a lot better shape than we ever managed.”
This is not the first time FIU has run into trouble with the NCAA. In 2008, FIU lost 11 sports scholarships for “misapplied enrollment and financial aid rules, transfer requirements and eligibility rules” during their shift from Division I-AA to Division I-A.
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