Buffalo on the APR Bowl Bubble!

NCAA APR's are out today and for the UB Bulls it's a mixed bag.

But before we get into the specifics what, you may ask, is APR?

Each scholarship athlete receives one retention point for staying in school and one eligibility point for being academically eligible. So Branden Oliver, for example, earns two points for being at UB with a GPA high enough to play.

Because difference schools have different numbers of athletes on scholarship a team’s total points are divided by the points possible and then multiplied by one thousand to equal the team’s Academic Progress Rate score. So a perfect score is 1000. These APR's are then taken over a course of four years and averaged out.

The good news! UB's has it's second highest multi year APR of the FBS era. Buffalo's current multiyear APR is 925, being only the 2009-2010 APR score of 930. It's been a long process from the days of sub 900 rates which plagued the university two coaches ago.

The bad news is that the 4 year progress rate has to be 930 and Buffalo is woefully short of that. For UB to move their four year rolling APR up to 930 this seasons edition has to put up a 945.

Football teams generally carry 85 grants-in-aid. If 76 student-athletes remain in school and academically eligible, four remain in school but are academically ineligible then the teams APR will be 947. In effect the team can lose any combination 9 points. If 5 drop out, for example, that's a loss of 10 points and UB would not be eligible for post season play in 2014.

So this is a year where Quinn needs to team to succeed on the field to keep his job and to succeed in the classroom to keep the program post season eligible the following year.