Ole Miss Athletics Again Breaks Overall APR Record

Ole Miss Athletics continues to soar in the classroom, breaking the department record for the highest APR score yet again with a multi-year average of 991 in the annual APR release by the NCAA on Tuesday.

Ole Miss recorded a single-year APR score of 986 in this latest report from the 2018-19 school year, and its new multi-year score of 991 sits eight points above the national average of 983. Within the 16 sports at Ole Miss, the Rebels hold a cumulative average of plus-8.4 points ahead of the national average score, including a sizable plus-14.6 point ahead in men’s sports.

“Ole Miss is a special place for student-athletes, and these APR scores again reflect that,” said Senior Associate Athletics Director for Student-Athlete Development Dr. Bob Baker. “I am super thankful for our staff, administration, faculty and coaches who consistently push our student-athletes to achieve their academic goals, including degree completion, and for supporting them as they compete at the highest level in the best athletic conference in the nation.”

The newest APR numbers for Ole Miss also stack up well against the SEC, sitting at plus-5.3 points ahead of the conference average in common sports that both Ole Miss and the SEC offer. The Rebels lead or are tied for the SEC lead in multi-year APR in six different sports – men’s cross country, football, men’s golf, women’s golf, women’s tennis and men’s track – with sizable leads in football (997 rests seven points ahead of runner-up Alabama) and men’s track (995 sits nine points ahead of runner-up Florida).

That multi-year APR score of 997 by the Ole Miss football team shattered its previous record of 978 from the 2017-18 release, putting the Rebels at No. 3 in the nation in multi-year APR by a football program in the NCAA this season behind Columbia (999) and Washington (999). Ole Miss ended up plus-33 above the national Division I football average of 964 and plus-17 above the SEC football average of 980. The 995 by the men’s track team also stood in stark contrast, resting at plus-21 against the national average (974) and plus-26 against the SEC average (969).

Of the 16 sports at Ole Miss, nine posted perfect single-season scores of 1,000 while an additional four – men’s cross country, men’s golf, women’s golf and women’s tennis – own perfect multi-year scores of 1,000. Those four programs, along with the Ole Miss football team, each own multi-year scores within the top-10 percent of their sports nationally, which earned them the NCAA APR Public Recognition Award last week.

The APR, created to provide more real-time measurement of academic success than graduation rates offer, is a team-based metric where scholarship student-athletes earn one point each term for remaining eligible and one point for staying in school or graduating. Schools that don’t offer scholarships track their recruited student-athletes.

Every Division I sports team submits data to have its Academic Progress Rate calculated each academic year. The NCAA reports both single-year rates and four-year rates, on which penalties for poor academic performance are based. National aggregates are based on all teams with usable, Member-provided data. APRs for each team, lists of teams receiving public recognition and those receiving sanctions are available online through the NCAA’s searchable database.

Courtesy of Ole Miss Sports