Michigan Football and Hockey Each Lose a Player

It was announced today that Sophomore Forward, Max Pacioretty has signed a three-year deal with the Montreal Canadians. Patch won CCHA Freshman of the year last year with 15 goals and 24 assists. He was fifth among freshman nationally with 39 points. Pacioretty was expected to step up and help fill the scoring void left from departing Hobey Baker winner, Kevin Porter.

The football team will be without the services of Marques Slocum who will not return in the fall due to academic reasons. Slocum went to JUCO for a year and then spent a year here at U of M to make himself NCAA eligible but apparently that didn't last. This is not a huge surprise to me, considering Slocum has forgotten his U of M ID card at least two or three times in the West Quad Cafeteria over the last year. Slocum is also playing pick up basketball just about every day in the CCRB which now makes a lot more sense.

The Ann Arbor News Refuses to Quit

Credit the Ann Arbor News for their persistence, I guess. Today's headline story: University of Michigan Officials Balk at Academics and Athletics Probe. Basic summary of the story is that the University doesn't want to talk about their mini-investigation that they did as a response to the previous Ann Arbor News special on Academics & Athletics at U of M.

It's a bit of a reach to be publishing a story criticizing the university for not wanting to talk about a scandal that no matter how hard the AA News tries, just does not exist.

Latest Acedemic Progress Reports Released

Tuesday the NCAA released its annual Academic Progress Report (APR). The APR is the NCAA's new way to gage a school's academic progress on a sport by sport basis. The scoring system is a bit complicated, so instead of trying to confuse you by trying to explain it, I'll let a professional journalist do it.

From the St.Louis Post-Dispatch:

The scores are calculated by giving teams one point for each athlete that stays in school and another for each athlete that remains academically eligible. The point totals are then divided by the team’s maximum points possible to derive a score equivalent to a percentage.

Per NCAA guidelines, teams that score below 925 and have a student leave school academically ineligible can lose up to 10 percent of their scholarships. Known as immediate penalties, these scholarships can be lost each year and not awarded until the following year.

Starting next year, teams that receive three straight years of historical penalties (below 900 APR) face the potential of restrictions on postseason competition for the team, in addition to scholarship and practice restrictions.

Over 700 Division I teams had APR scores below the required 925, however only 218 were punished, ranging from warnings to scholarship restrictions. Among BCS schools, eighteen schools were penalized, eight each in men's and women's basketball and two in football. Around the Big Ten, the most notable punishment was Purdue losing one scholarship for men's basketball.

On the bright side, the NCAA also released a list of schools receiving Public Recognition Awards, given out to a team finishing in the top 10 percent of the APR in their sport. Michigan received four such awards, for baseball, men's and women's golf, and women's tennis, with both golf teams and the women's tennis teams receiving perfect scores. The only Michigan team to come close to missing the APR guidelines was the men's basketball team, with a score of 927. You can get a complete breakdown of every Michigan sport here. Every Big Ten team received at least one award, and Northwestern led the conference with 8 awards. Some other notes from across the country, Duke had the most awards of any BCS school with 12 awards, and Yale led all schools with 28 awards (note that there are only 29 possible sports in which to win awards). As should be expected, each team in the Ivy League received awards, with Colombia taking home the fewest, 9, although only 5 other non-Ivy teams had higher totals (behind the US Naval Academy, Duke, Georgetown, Boston College, and Stanford).

The new NCAA policies seem to be working, as over the last four years scores have increased in 26 of the 29 sports covered by the APR (men's ice hockey, men's swimming, and men's water polo decreased). Overall women's teams had an average score of 969, while men's teams had an average of 951.

WCBN Sports Podcast

The WCBN Sports Podcast has been updated furiously in the past couple of days, with all of the goal highlights, highlight compilations, and pictures from this weekend's CCHA Tournament. The podcast is also headlined by Tony and Stu's phenomenal interview with Jim Carty. Check it all out, and bookmark the podcast because it will continue to be updated constantly with original WCBN Sports material, made exclusively for the podcast. Next up: MLB Season Preview, NCAA Hockey Tournament Preview, Michigan Baseball Update (if they ever play again).

WCBN Interview with Jim Carty

WCBN's Tony Bolton and Stuart Zaas sit down with Jim Carty of the Ann Arbor News and discuss his 4-part special on Academics and Athletics at the University of Michigan. We will discuss this issue more in-depth during our Game of the Week broadcast a week from Friday.

Listen to the full audio