The NCAA has released this year's Graduation Success Rate report that guages the success of student athletes at the member instutions ability to recieve their diplomas. The GSR measures the single-year graduation rate for Division 1 athletes who began college in the fall of 2004 and were given six years to finish.
Later this week, the NCAA is expected to vote on stricter graduation rules that will require sports teams to graduate 50 percent of their student-athletes to participate in postseason tournaments and bowl games (the metric the association would use to determine eligibility would be APR figures and not GSR numbers).
If that restriction were in place last season, men’s basketball champion University of Connecticut would have been ineligible to compete. The new rules, if passed, are not expected to be in place for this year's football post-season or the 2012 NCAA Men's Basketball tournament.
In the SEC, that would not have a huge affect since every school save one, South Carolina, is well above that 50% threshold. In fact, the national GSR for football players at Football Bowl Subdivision schools was 69 percent and four SEC schools either matched or exceeded that number, Alabama, Florida, LSU and Vanderbilt. (UPDATE, C&F, 6:50 p.m. ET: South Carolina says there was an error in its submission, and the corrected data will show "a significant increase.")
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Source: NCAA
The changes could have more impact to SEC men's basketball as half the schools men's basketball programs currently fall beneath the 50% threshold including two teams that participated in the 2010 NCAA tournament, Florida and Tennessee. (By the proposed APR metric the only SEC school that would have been ineligible for last year's tournament would have been Arkansas.)
For men's basketball, the national GSR Rate was 68 percent, a total four SEC schools bested; Kentucky, LSU, Ole Miss, Vanderbilt. This graph compares the conference schools numbers along with possible future SEC members Texas A&M and Missouri.
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Source: NCAA