North Texas athletic director Rick Villarreal said Monday the school has the right plan in place to improve its scores on the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate report, but acknowledged it could take time for its four-year averages to increase.

Rick Villarreal

UNT’s football program lost five scholarships and the men’s basketball team one following the latest APR report that was released last week. Only eight football programs were hit harder than UNT, which posted a four-year score of 917 that ranked fourth out of nine teams in the Sun Belt Conference.

Five Sun Belt football teams had a lower APR score than UNT, but only two were penalized. Both Florida Atlantic and Florida International lost three scholarships.

Programs that have scores lower than 925 on the report, which measures a school’s ability to keep its students in school and eligible, are subject to scholarship penalties. The NCAA’s latest report took into account four years culminating with the 2006-07 school year.

“I feel confident that changes have and will continue to occur, but because it’s a four-year rolling average, until we can drop some of our old scores and replace them with higher scores, we may not immediately attain an overall 925,” Villarreal said. “I am confident that we will show progress, and we will have to so that the NCAA feels comfortable that we are on the right track academically.”

The NCAA awards each student-athlete a point for staying in school and another for remaining eligible. The percentage of the possible points a team earns accounts for its score.

A score of 925 equates to a school or program earning 92.5 percent of the possible points.

If a school falls under 925, it can lose a scholarship for each student who leaves school while academically ineligible.

Schools can avoid penalties if their athletes graduate at a rate 10 percent higher than their student body based on an the athletic department’s projected graduation rate derived from APR scores, show that they are underfunded, or receive waivers from the NCAA for showing improvement. The NCAA denied waiver appeals by UNT, which has a graduation rate of 42 percent for its student body, according to NCAA figures.

“We look at each school individually and take into account a number of factors,” NCAA spokesman Erik Christianson said. “One is that if a school can demonstrate that it is a low-resource institution. There are also a number of factors that can go into receiving a conditional waiver. A big part of it is the plan that schools submit to improve their academic situation. We also look at if a school has improved its scores.”

The NCAA requires that each program with an APR score under 925 develop a plan to improve.

UNT head football coach Todd Dodge just completed his first year with the Mean Green and has had a few athletes leave his program, including Kevin Ealey and Evyn Roman, two members of his first recruiting class.

UNT also held several players out of spring practice so that they could work on improving their academic standing. How those players fare will affect UNT’s future APR scores.

Villarreal expressed confidence that once Dodge is able to bring in more of his own recruits, UNT’s football program will quickly improve its APR scores and catch up to the rest of the athletic department. UNT’s basketball program fell just one point short of meeting the APR benchmark with a score of 924.

The rest of UNT’s programs fared well on the APR report, including the women’s soccer team, which posted a score of 990 that ranked among the top 20 percent among soccer programs nationally.

UNT has improved its overall graduation rate among student-athletes from 37 to 67 percent from 2001 to 2006, according to figures provided by the athletic department.

Villarreal credited UNT’s improvements in its graduation rates to the steps the athletic department has taken to improve its academic standing, including building an academic center and adding academic personnel.

Villarreal believes those improvements will carry over to football, which will have some ground to make up on the APR in the next few years.

“Our graduation rates and overall APR scores show that the system works when all three components — administration, coaches and student-athletes — do their part,” Villarreal said.

BRETT VITO can be reached at 940-566-6870. His e-mail address is bvito@dentonrc.com .