The NCAA has stripped six scholarships from two University of North Texas athletic teams because of poor academic performance by UNT student athletes. This is not good news for a school that is hanging by its fingernails to the bottom rung of big-time college sports.

The Mean Green football team lost five scholarships for next year and the basketball team lost one because the two teams’ average Academic Progress Rate (APR) scores were below the NCAA’s required 925 standard.

Arriving at a program’s APR is a pretty arcane business involving each athlete’s earning “points” for (1) staying in school, and (2) remaining academically eligible. The magic 925 number means that athletes in a program have earned 92.5 percent of the possible points. If a program goes under that average, it can lose one scholarship for each student athlete who leaves school while academically ineligible. Personally, we’d be inclined to award an extra point or two to any athlete who could explain the process in one cogent paragraph. Trying to do so here has just about given us a case of the vapors.

The Record-Chronicle’s Brett Vito, who broke the bad news last week, finally caught up with UNT Athletic Director Rick Villarreal on Monday, and while insisting that UNT has a plan to improve the school’s APR numbers, Villarreal acknowledged that it will take some time for those improvements to yield tangible results.

Because the NCAA uses a four-year, rolling average to compute a program’s APR performance, Villarreal said, one or more of those past bad years is going to have to get dropped before the improvements kick into the average in a meaningful way.

Villarreal was vague as to how these improvements would be made, saying only that UNT had a plan, and that it involved getting more of new football coach Todd Dodge’s recruits into the system.

It would be a mistake to make too much of this one-time setback in the athletic department’s academic fortunes. We are as aware as anyone of the skewed priorities that accompany a university’s efforts to crash the athletic big time, but the fact is that UNT student athletes already compare favorably with the student body as a whole when it comes to graduation rates. UNT is no football factory; its graduation rate testifies to that as eloquently as does its modest win-loss record.

But this latest development is not insignificant, either, and we wish the athletic director had been a little more specific as to what he and his department had in mind to improve the situation.

Villarreal’s forte, of course, is the glittering generalization; he is as much a showman and public-relations man as he is an administrator. For all we know, that’s exactly what a school like UNT needs as an athletic director.

If he says UNT has a plan, we will take him at his word for now, and note only that his rhetorical sleight-of-hand is a lot more effective when he sticks to less serious subjects, such as the merits of school spirit or the need for a new logo on the football helmets.

Somewhere along the way, he needs to figure out a way to keep more kids in class and awake.