Tennessee’s football program continues to excel in the classroom under the direction of head coach Butch Jones.
The Vols posted a single-season program record Academic Progress Rate (APR) with a score of 972 in the 2013-14 academic year, for which results were released Wednesday afternoon. This comes on the heels of the football team posting a program-record 2.85 GPA for the spring semester.
Tennessee’s other athletic teams also fared well, all either matching or improving their rates from the previous year in the updated APR.
But the football score is the crown jewel this year for a program that had been in real danger of suffering NCAA penalties if the score wasn’t brought up significantly. Tennessee posted a 909 as recently as the 2011-12 season, and flirted with the 930 multi-year average that makes a program subject to NCAA penalties. The Vols did enough last season to slip by with a 932 multi-year average, and these new rankings push the Vols to an even more comfortable multi-year score of 945.
The biggest takeaway is that, for the time being, Tennessee’s football program is in virtually no danger of facing NCAA penalties in an area that was a huge concern a couple years ago.
“Academics are at the forefont of our football program,” Butch Jones said in a release. “We want students who are committed to being champions on and off the field. The significant improvements in the APR are evidence of what we have been talking about. Dr. Joe Scogin and the entire Thornton Center staff have done a great job of mentoring, guiding and holding our players and coaching staff to a high level of accountability and responsibility.”
Full list of APR scores released by Tennessee:
