There is a good point contained in there
Posted on: November 14, 2018 at 09:46:17 CT
FIJItiger
MU
Posts:
141923
Member For:
21.28 yrs
Level:
Moderator
M.O.B. Votes:
1
APR is a terrible metric. Despite being called 'academic progress' what it is actually measuring is turnover and retainment. However, as you said because they grant waivers for almost every situation it essentially becomes a meaningless metric because even situations that exactly fit the criteria of what they are trying to measure are granted waivers erasing the impact. It doesn't actually measure anything, the only point is you must maintain a 4 year score above 930 so you don't get penalized. And if you are in danger of falling below that threshold it may impact some of your decisions about roster building.
But the reason there is a very good point in there that is almost never talked about is that as you said you can get a waiver to negate the score for almost every situation. Even if there is no basis for it or it is exactly what they are trying to measure, if you put a little bit of work into it you can just get the score adjusted.
We didn't have APR issues when Kim was hired. In fact, we hadn't even gotten our 2012-13 score when he was hired. About a month into his tenure those totals were tabulated and reported, for a multiyear score of 969. Then after that point Torren Jones and Shane Rector and Cameron Beidschied all left MU.
The report that resulted in our single year score of 851 that is always attributed to Haith was filed on 5/26/15. The reason the score is so low is due to the players who left after Kim came to MU. At that point, it was already obvious we had made a disaster of a hire and there was a need to create a narrative that explained the historic levels of failure.....and MU simply did not attempt to file any waivers and got a terrible score. Since that point each season that followed actually had more player turnover and more examples of things that should fundamentally impact APR scores. But we have always been able to manage around them with an abundance of waivers.
Much like the silly investigation/probation/vacating of a season, MU created a scenario by inactivity that caused our 2013-14 APR score to be absurdly low. Maybe that that is because our staff didn't know what they were doing due to inexperience/ineptitude/being in over their head or maybe something more sinister was afoot. I don't think we will ever know. But if someone was both competent and had wanted to not make our 2013-14 score a problem we could have taken the same approach we have every other season and simply filed for a bunch of waivers to get a satisfactory score.
Edited by FIJItiger at 09:50:13 on 11/14/18