If you based your 2013 NCAA men’s basketball tournament picks purely on academics, here’s guessing you’re at the very bottom of your March Madness pool(s).
Right before this year’s tournament kicked off, I created a “Simply Academic” bracket based on each competing team’s Academic Progress Rate (APR), as laid out in a recent report from the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. The APR is a four-year metric that takes into account each student-athlete’s academic standing and retention on the team.
In each matchup, whichever team possessed a higher APR advanced. When both teams had the exact same APR, I advanced the team seeded higher by the NCAA tournament-selection committee, in the interest of allowing athletics to have