Wyoming Athletics Department Raises APR Score by 12 points

LARAMIE -- One year ago today the NCAA released its Academic Progress Rate scores.

That was welcome news for 133 FBS football programs.

The problem?

There are 134 of those.

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Akron, Wyoming's opening-day opponent, was on the outside looking in with an overall department score of 914. The implications of that failure meant the Zips were ineligible for postseason play and faced a reduction in practice time.

Idaho was the last program to face this punishment. That came all the way back in 2014.

The ramification of those results, in the long run, were even stiffer.

The Sun Belt, an FBS conference the Vandals were most recently members of from 2014-17, decided not to renew a deal with the school. A year later, Paul Petrino's team dropped down to the FCS level, joining the Big Sky, where it remains today.

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Akron, last fall, won five games, one shy of the threshold for bowl eligibility. The Cowboys blanked the Zips 10-0 on a soggy evening inside InfoCision Stadium.

Wyoming improved its overall APR score from a year ago by 12 points and is currently at 988, with nine squads -- men's and women's golf, tennis, volleyball, women's basketball, women's cross country, women's swimming and diving and women's track and field -- all earning a perfect mark of 1,000.

For five of those teams – men's golf, tennis, volleyball, women's basketball and women's cross-country – that number has been reached in multiple years.

Though the football-only score wasn't specified in a school release, head coach Jay Sawvel said he's confident, as a whole, his squad is flirting with a cumulative GPA of 3.0, a feat that hasn't been accomplished in his six seasons on campus.

Each academic year, every Division I sports team's APR is calculated using a simple and consistent formula. Scholarship student-athletes can earn 1 point for staying on course for a degree in their chosen major and 1 point for being retained (or graduating) at the end of each academic term.

A team's total points are divided by points possible and then multiplied by 1,000. For schools that do not offer athletics scholarships, recruited student-athletes are tracked.

This is the fifth consecutive year of publicly reported APRs after a one-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, the Division I Board of Directors approved the release of APR scores but voted to continue the suspension of program penalties.

* A UW press release contributed to this report

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