Along with improvement on field, Florida State's APR taking flight under Mike Norvell
It took Mike Norvell a few years to get the Florida State football team back to its winning ways on the field. And now, he and his support staff clearly have the Seminoles back on track in the classroom as well.
In the later years of former head coach Jimbo Fisher’s tenure, the FSU football team’s Academic Progress Rate (APR) scores bottomed out to a level among the worst in the country.
The Seminoles’ single-year APR in the 2017-18 academic year — which included Fisher’s last season — was a dismal 922 (out of a possible 1,000 points). And Florida State’s multi-year APR, a four-year rolling score which is seen as the more important metric to determine a program’s academic health, dropped to 936.
That ranked lowest of any school in the Football Bowl Subdivision that year and placed the Seminoles in danger of facing future NCAA penalties.
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Fast-forward to the latest APR scores, which were released today by the NCAA and are based on the 2021-22 academic year, and Florida State has made major strides across the board. The Seminoles posted a single-year APR score of 981 and their multi-year APR is 972 — both of which are vast improvements from just a few years earlier.
The 972 is the highest multi-year APR for the Florida State football program since the NCAA started charting the metric in 2004-05. The Seminoles’ previous high was 959, recorded that first year.
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According to the NCAA, the APR is designed to measure “eligibility, graduation and retention each semester or academic term” for every individual sports program. Some of the factors that can hurt a program’s APR include players becoming ineligible, failing to graduate on time and leaving school while not in satisfactory academic standing.
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Norvell, who led Florida State to a 10-3 record last season, has placed an emphasis on academics since he arrived in December 2019. After his first semester, the Seminoles posted the highest team grade-point average in program history.
Even with those vast improvements, Florida State’s football program still has a ways to go to catch most other Atlantic Coast Conference programs. FSU’s multi-year score of 972 ranks ahead of only Virginia Tech (967) and Syracuse (955) in the conference.
Last year, the Seminoles’ four-year APR was 958. In 2017-18, it was 936 — the worst in the ACC.
(In case you were wondering, Fisher’s current school, Texas A&M, posted an APR score of 933 for the 2021-22 academic year; it was the only men’s or women’s sport at the school with a single-year APR below 960. The Aggies’ multi-year APR of 949 in football is the school’s worst since 2010-11.)
Florida State’s other sports continued to perform well in the academic progress report.
The Seminoles’ men’s basketball and men’s swimming teams posted single-year scores of 1,000, while every women’s sport other than track (969) scored a perfect 1,000. The low achievers on the men’s side were cross country at 944 and baseball at 953.
The NCAA requires a multi-year score of below 930 before a program faces any penalties or sanctions, which can include loss of scholarships. And no FSU programs are currently near that plateau.
Talk about this story with other die-hard FSU football fans on the Tribal Council.
