Syracuse University sports teams continue to perform well in the classroom

The Syracuse University athletics department says that multiple Orange squads are in the top 10 percent of their sport nationally for academics.

Understandably, the vast majority of articles and columns published at Inside The Loud House focus on how Syracuse University sports teams, like men’s basketball and football, fare on the court or field.

But when stellar achievements are reached in the classroom by Orange teams, those good deeds deserve some recognition, too, particularly with all the depressing news of late brought on by the novel coronavirus pandemic.

The university’s athletics department announced via cuse.com this week that, for the eighth year in a row, Syracuse scored higher than a 982 in the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate (APR) program.

Per the NCAA’s Web site, the APR “holds institutions accountable for the academic progress of their student-athletes through a team-based metric that accounts for the eligibility and retention of each student-athlete for each academic term.”

The APR is calculated by each student-athlete receiving athletically related financial aid earning one point for staying in school and one point for being academically eligible. An individual team’s total points are divided by points possible, and then multiplied by 1,000 to equal the group’s APR. Beyond a crew’s current-stanza APR, its rolling four-term APR is also used to determine accountability.

With that as context, the Syracuse press release says that the Orange’s 2018-19 APR score of 987 ties for the university’s second-highest rating since the APR began in 2006.

Credit must go where credit is due, and this is a tremendous collective accomplishment by ‘Cuse student-athletes. Syracuse officials also noted that every SU team surpassed the minimum score standard of 930.

A half-dozen Orange units – men’s cross country, men’s track & field, men’s lacrosse, women’s volleyball, women’s tennis and women’s soccer – ranked in the top 10 percent of their sport nationally, which is third-most in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Additionally, five of those teams generated a perfect multi-year score of 1,000, representing the third straight year that Syracuse has had at least five squads achieve a perfect multi-campaign score.

Finally, for 2018-19, nine ‘Cuse crews posted a perfect one-year rate, marking the fourth term in a row that Syracuse has possessed that many teams reaching this milestone. Congratulations, Orange student-athletes!