Thought we would all find this interesting. http://sports.espn.go.com/ncaa/news/story?id=1964069 The APR will be based on the number of student-athletes on each team who achieve eligibility and return to campus full-time each term. There will also be a longer-term graduation success rate. Beginning next fall, teams that fall under a minimum APR will lose scholarships when players who are academically ineligible leave the school. Such scholarships can't be re-awarded for a year. This could REALLY impact college soccer. For one thing, because of the MLS preseason, many seniors don't return for the second semester of their senior year, opting instead to go through preseason and then the start of the regular season with their pro club rather than joining the team after they finish the semester. Now, there have been some exceptions - Eddie Pope and Mark Lisi come to mind - but I think it's fair to say that most seniors postpone school to instead try and make an MLS team. And then there's whole P40 issue. If I'm understanding the legislation correctly, schools will be punished if players who are eligible don't return the following semester. By definition, that's the P40 (or whatever they call them now) players. If schools are getting punished because their players are leaving early for the pros, will programs look to recruit the really elite players who have a better chance to go pro early than average top shelf prospects. Already teams have altered the recruiting of elite players because they don't want to deal with the disruptions that come from having players leave early. But that was just a philosophical discussion but if you could handle the disruption of players leaving early, it was worth it to sign these elite pro prospects. But now, programs will be punished for bringing these players in if they leave early, thus making the best players undesirable unless they commit for four years. So as I said, this could really alter the landscape of recruiting and college soccer. Combine this with reserve teams creating more playing opportunities at the professional level, expanded rosters, more MLS teams and the talk of dropping spring soccer and college soccer could change dramatically the next few years.
My understanding is that the 50% APR is the "trigger" point for sanctions to occur when academically ineligible players leave the school, for whatever reason. In other words, if a school is at 52% and an athlete in poor academic standing leaves (flunks out or enters the draft), the school isn't automatically sanctioned (although the APR would drop). If the same thing happened when the school's APR was already at 50%, then the sanctions would kick in. In any event, I suspect that the heat will be on virtually all olympic sports to minimize the number of players to leave early for whatever reason. I'd agree that soccer is particularly problematic among olympic sports, and the recruiting of players who'll likely declare early P-40 (adidas Elite now, I think) is probably going to be discouraged. I suspect this will affect a few programs in a big way (Indiana, Maryland, UVa for example), but won't have much overall impact on the college game since there just aren't that many players involved on a yearly basis. No doubt that parity among teams will increase, however, and tournament selections will become more contentious as a result.
But schools like Indiana, Duke, Wake Forest, Stanford, etc probably have really good grad rates for all sports (only know about Duke for sure). The schools like UCLA and Maryland that may be trying harder to compete in football I'd guess could be the types of schools to have problems for soccer. But I don't know these details too well. The NCAA may mean well, but I don't like their heavy-handed regulating of everything. I'm not too concerned with the players with true pro talent focusing on developing their skills 1st and academics 2nd. It's reasonable. They face worldwide competition. Only American football seems exempt from that so far.
No, its not soft because its not targeted at soccer. This one is pretty clearly targeted at football/basketball.