Well ... you & I have to discuss three things.
Number 1: It is a game. It is not directly related to learning or progression towards a degree when within the division you can clearly have a significant number of kids that have no concern for the APR goal. The School makes sure they don't take a hit; the Kids at risk are "paper" advanced. (WHAT? You thought the UNC example was an outlier? I think that's par for bigtime.)
Number 2: As you pointed out, we had a perfect path to a perfect score. But big deal. What are we really trying to do IF Drummond & Lamb are your examples of "failed" students? Development of young men into good adults is what KO preaches. I think the Harvey Araton focus on our Grad rates misses the point of that.
Number 3; The true measurement is related to what Kevin Ollie stated. We develop good men from fairly raw talented athletes. Over & over. I think that is a great record and NOT tied to this APR. At the 30 year mark (soon!!) when Calhoun drove down 195, I think we have an outstanding track record of sending guys into productive lives. Whether that is in NBA playoffs ... or as a Teacher/Social Worker in a Connecticut school.
We're close to being on the same page. My basic point was that we didn't game the system. Our players in the last two years have legitimately made academic progress towards their degrees - at least to the best of our current knowledge (Bazz, Giff and Tyler getting them). There are ways to game the numbers, and perhaps we did that with Drummond and Lamb to make sure they had enough credits before leaving. The NCAA's "satisfactory progress" after one year (24 credits) is well short of being on pace to graduate - so you can figure out how to make sure they do just enough to cross that threshold and not count against you, with the idea that they are even trying to get a degree just being a sham (Drummond, incidentally, has taken some courses at UConn since leaving, so he was never really a sham of a student-athlete, and Lamb wasn't really an early-entry candidate coming out of HS, he just blew up in college).
The APR is a foolish system - in fact, I find the whole way people pontificate about graduation rates, etc. to be ridiculous. In college baseball, anyone with any sort of pro aspirations typically leaves after three years and doesn't graduate. In basketball, if seniors who are borderline-to-long-shot NBA guys want to make the decision to forget their final semester of college to go focus on workouts and put their minds 100 percent to basketball, they should have that right. They're adults at that point - capable of their own decisions, and college will always be there to finish up some credits later (these are presumably all guys who can make decent money overseas).
If the NCAA takes a closer look and finds out that a college program isn't graduating kids because they don't provide the adequate support system and don't give a hoot about them after they play their final game, that's another matter. But if someone like Jerome Dyson or Jeff Adrien puts off graduating to take their best shot at the pros, and deal with being one semester short until they can come back and finish up, to me that's their business. Reducing everything to a number is oversimplifying a complex issue.
