Ryan Day’s Ohio State football program continues to find new ways to win.
The NCAA revealed on Tuesday that the Buckeyes posted a perfect multi-year Academic Progress Rate score of 1,000, making them the only Division I college football program to achieve that feat. They were ahead of Alabama at 998 as well as Harvard — who was tied with Ohio State for the top APR score last year — at 997.
APR scores give each team a glimpse of how their team is collectively performing in the classroom by tracking the academic progress of each student-athlete who is on scholarship. It accounts for academic eligibility, retention and graduation and provides a measure of each team’s academic performance. The most recent APR scores are based on a multi-year rate that averages scores from the 2020-21, 2022-22, 2022-23 and 2023-24 academic years.
Football is one of seven Ohio State athletic programs to post perfect multi-year APR scores, including men’s and women’s cross country, men’s fencing, men’s golf, women’s soccer and women’s volleyball. Twelve programs had a score of at least 990, while the athletic program as a whole had a multi-year APR rate of 990.
“At a time when media attention is myopically focused on money in college athletics, our student-athletes consistently demonstrate that academic opportunity through sport is still at the heart of the enterprise,” said Ohio State faculty athletics representative Dr. John Davidson “Their success is a tribute not just to their hard work but to an athletics culture embraced by coaches, administrators, and support staff that holds education to be a primary goal.”
In the single-year results for 2023-24, 18 Ohio State programs had a perfect score. That list includes: men’s basketball, men’s and women’s cross country, football, men’s fencing, men’s golf, men’s and women’s gymnastics, men’s hockey, men’s lacrosse, softball, women’s soccer, men’s and women’s tennis, men’s track and field, men’s and women’s volleyball and wrestling.
These impressive scores only continue a recent string of academic success across Ohio State athletics this spring. This academic year, 250 Buckeye student-athletes have been to the Academic All-Big Ten team, including a school record 147 honored from fall sports (spring academic honors come out later this month), and 805 were named Ohio State Scholar-Athletes. Two-hundred sixty-two student-athletes received degrees this school year, with 50 earning them at autumn commencement and 212 at spring commencement on Sunday.
