New Fiscal Year! I'm Liking Me some 2010-11!!!

Hey gang, well, I haven't been blogging too much, but I think folks will enjoy the reason for that. Well, the main reason for that...true, I took a little vacation with my 14-year old daughter to Colorado so she could see her first major league baseball games. Also true..within 10 minutes of being in the ballpark at Coors Field a Milwaukee Brewer bullpen catcher tossed her a baseball.

Also true, I took about 10 days to go to Los Angeles to get presented with my van (you can watch it and my perfect zinger on Michael Emerson on youtube) and then I spent some time in Mesa, Arizona as the official scorer for the Western Athletic Conference baseball tournament. However, much of my time has been spent on a special little project I think you fans, and heck, anyone associated with the Bengals should be excited about.

Go to this page here...look at that map where Pocatello is located. See it? We have officially joined the ICS/Sidearm family, and we have been actively working on the new site, which is now in the design phase.

This is really really really exciting, and what has already been a tremendous amount of work is only going to become more work for us down here, but in the end it will be so worth it. Without going too deep and boring you folks to tears, there will be an Ask the A.D. section, text messaging of scores if you sign up, conference standings on the sport pages, individual sport page headers (so football players are on the football page, women's cross country on the WXC page, etc.), a fan center (with all off our marketing and promotions information, facebook, twitter, blogs, photos, wallpapers, etc.), donor information area, and new live stat applications (including soccer and softball). It's going to be fantastic. Oh yeah....an ONLINE STORE for Bengal gear! FINALLY!!!!! And the heaven's opened and the choirs sing! I'm more excited about that then anything else actually.

Also, I should mention that we have had a wonderful relationship with CBS properties for eight years, and they have been great throughout this process. They got us into a solid web presence, and now we are taking the next step.

I'll try to post updates here as we are in the process of stuff, but ICS has all the photos for the headers and design, and they have the basic info on the types of layouts that we are looking for. Should be great stuff.

HOOP NEWS
This will be on the site tomorrow once I get all the info, but the men's basketball team will be headed to Canada for a preseason three-game tour. This tour in mid-August is a huge advantage for ISU with all the newcomers, and most will be able to make the trip since they are in summer school already. Should be three games in the Vancouver area, so Bengal fans in that area should be on the lookout for us.

FORMER BENGAL HOOPSTERS GETTING HIRED
As the softball coaching search continues here at ISU, kudos to former Bengal greats Mandi Carver and D'Marr Suggs, who each picked up coaching duties in the last few days. Mandi, one of the all-time greats at Idaho State University and a no-brainer first ballot Hall of Famer in my mind, was hired at Cal State Bakersfield, meaning ISU might get to see her when we go there for basketball on December 7. D'Marr got hired onto to Louis Wilson's staff at Adams State as a graduate assistant. Two years ago D'Marr came to our game with UNC in Greeley, so this is a great opportunity for him.

SCHEDULE STUFF
Both basketball non-conferences are pretty set (the men have one opening for a home game if they can swing it), so those schedules will get released once the conference schedule is finalized (it's new this year with a Thursday/Saturday/Monday set up). ISU has a home weekend the same weekend as the conference track championships in Holt Arena, so we are working on swapping out a date, and once that's done, we will be able to release it. ISU is a home team in the bracket buster, although that will be in Reed Gym due to the Simplot Games, and it will be a split doubleheader most likely with the women, who host Montana that day as well.

OK, I'll keep you informed on the website stuff...keep sending in suggestions and thought on what you'd like to see....I haven't gotten much from you guys...

FM

Playing the APR Game...

In college athletics, lots of acronyms make or break players, coaches, teams … acronyms like RBI, or PPG, or PCT. Fans know these acronyms and stats, and can spout them off without hesitation. I still to this day know that in 1982, National League Cy Young winner Steve Carlton hit .218 while National League home run champion Dave Kingman hit just .204, albeit with 37 home runs (I didn’t even have to look that up, and no lie, in high school I was on the Quiz Bowl team mostly for the sports knowledge and that question came up…I was the only egghead who even remotely had a shot at that and I nailed it).

However, there is another acronym that programs, and college coaches, more and more are getting judged on, and it’s a stat that is increasingly becoming as important as wins and losses. It’s three little letters with a mighty big punch.

APR

Academic Progress Rate … a Division I system only that is greatly misunderstood, and in reality, probably hurts schools at ISU’s level more than BCS schools and leagues, but it is a system that is here to stay, and so the game, as they say, is afoot.

APR seems like a simple process to figure out in theory. Of course, to me, a car engine and how it works is a simple process in theory…put gas in, turn the key, and hey, it works. Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that, and the same can be said with regards to APR.

In its simplest form, APR basically takes a student-athlete and breaks them down into two parts per semester, eligibility and retention. For this exercise, we will utilize a fictional player to make this easy…Charlie Brown (Bengal fans are chuckling I’m sure). Charlie Brown is worth two points per semester, one point for retention (staying in school) and one point for eligibility (being eligible the next semester), so if Charlie Brown is eligible and still at ISU after his fall semester, then he gets two points out of two. After the spring semester, if Charlie Brown comes back in the fall eligible, then he gets another two points out of two.

Seems simple enough, but it’s really not…especially on the retention area. If Charlie Brown leaves ISU but is eligible, then he is a 1-for-2 (he gets the eligibility point but loses the retention point). But there are exceptions…if Charlie Brown leaves school with a 2.6 GPA and transfers to four-year school, whether or not he plays sports, then the retention point is dropped completely, and Charlie is just a 1-for-1 for his last semester (the real world example of this is Taylor Marchione, who played softball last semester and is transferring to Oregon State to be closer to her family. Taylor isn’t going to play softball at Oregon State, but her GPA is high enough that Taylor’s APR score for the spring 2010 semester is 1-for-1, not 1-for-2. If they transfer to a junior college, then you lose the point.

Sometimes you can save that retention point in ways that only the really big schools can, for things like becoming eligible for the draft, or personal hardship, or many other ways that I can’t even think of.

Sometimes, you get nailed for having kids graduate…seriously. Lucas Steijn for men’s basketball cost ISU two points because he didn’t fill out the official graduation form, meaning that according to the NCAA, he didn’t graduate, even though he did. Since he was out of eligibility (having played four years) and not returning to ISU (since he graduated), Lucas was an 0-for-2…despite graduating.

In APR, the magic benchmark score is 925 … that score is figured by taking all the points earned in a sport, and dividing it by all the points possible. Let’s say a team for an academic year gets 46 points out of a possible 49, that percentage is .939, and then you multiply that by 1000, and that APR score would be a 939.

If a score is under 925 for four years (The overall APR is a four-year rolling score, which means every year the newest score will replace the oldest score, so a score stays in the equation for four years), and if a team has an 0-for-2 student-athlete, at that point, a team might incur penalties, but I’ll be honest, I don’t understand how some of the penalties come about.

Now, the reason all of this is coming out is to kind of put in layman’s terms the APR, because on Wednesday at noon or so, the NCAA will release their APR penalties, and while ISU was given high marks from the NCAA and given public recognition for having a perfect score in women’s cross country, ISU is going to get dinged pretty good in football.

By pretty good, what I mean is losing scholarships, counters, and practice time. ISU will lose two counters, meaning on national signing day, you can only get 23 kids instead of 25, and ISU will lose 3.84 scholarships (this is a change from what I posted yesterday, as I now have access to the official stuff, and it's 3.84, not 6.3 scholarships which is better). The practice time is four hours, meaning the team can only have 16 hours of countable time together, and they must take two days off a week, not one. That penalty is probably the one that hurts early in the season when school is in session, as during the actual season the team usually late in the season had Sunday and Monday off, so that will start earlier.

The good news is that this is not new news to ISU and the department, and it actually helped us get some things we sorely needed, the number one thing being an extra academic advisor in the form of Quinton Freeman. “Q”, as he was known when he was ISU’s starting safety back in the early 2000s, takes the pressure of 270 student-athletes off of Matt Steuart and gives ISU two academic advisors instead of one. The other thing that was implemented pretty quickly after we realized what some of the numbers were (and let’s be honest, of the 15 sports, ISU is doing really well in 13 of them, it’s football and softball that are struggling, and the softball thing is really tied to the coaching instability and the newness of the program) is what Jeff Tingey called the APR Improvement Plan.

This plan was modeled after some programs at other schools that have had the same issues and it has worked. The basic parts of the plan are as follows (this is from our release which is coming out when the NCAA announces the APR stuff nationally) …

“All potential student-athletes are required to have a cumulative GPA of 2.5 (excluding all PE activity classes). Matt Steuart, assistant A.D. for academics, and the Registrar's office will determine the GPA by removing PE activity classes, and all potential student-athletes need to either have scored at least an 18 on both their English and Math scores on their ACT or scored at least a 450 on both their English and Math scores for the SAT. In addition, Steuart will approve all transcripts along with the Office of Academic Affairs, and Steuart will also approve all scholarship tenders.”

This plan has been in plan already through this recruiting class (the one signed in February), and I can tell you it’s been an adjustment for everyone in how they handle recruiting, because there are some kids that normally you would recruit that you just can’t right now. Basically, until the APR scores go up, it’s hard to justify taking a chance on a kid because the downside (a kid not making it) is too great a risk to take.

The bonus is that there is clear evidence that the plan works and can really help not only a program with APR issues, but really help other teams with staying out of what I refer to as “APR Hell”. The real issue is APR is like a soft chair…easy to get in it, and hard to get out of it. Kudos to coaches like Joe O’Brien, Brian Jannsen, and Allison Gibson who understand how to play the APR game (and make no bones about it, there is a game to it), and next year once O’Brien has four years of APR scores from his own time here at ISU, he is going to rank among the nation’s top programs.

Coach Z has really been snake bit a good deal with the retention issues, because he runs into a situation where in football, kids don’t pan out. A walk-on leaving the program like Ben Laporta doesn’t hurt, and Kyle Blum graduated, so that doesn’t hurt. The Keith Goins’ and Kenny Viser’s of the world? Those hurt. That’s been a learning process for the football coaching and recruiting staff, and they are getting better. We won’t know this year’s score until the fall, but the early indications are it will be better, but I couldn’t fathom a guess as to where or how much.

The really interesting thing is to watch the official NCAA release and look at how many penalties are incurred by BCS schools (i.e., schools that have the money, resources, and academic infrastructure in place to help avoid penalties), and look at how many are from mid-major and smaller conferences (i.e., schools that need more funds/manpower/stuff/computers). John Canzano of the Oregonian has a great piece about APR and the issue at Portland State here and he talks about some of the loopholes and things much clearer than I can.

In the end, it’s going to look and sound bad, and it was a hot topic way back when on the Bengal Den and around the ISU internet presence. Make no bones, it’s a cause for concern, but it’s one of those things where it was seen coming down the pike and the solution was put in place a while back to get a handle on it. I suppose there are bunch of woulda/coulda/shoulda things that might have prevented this from even happening, but the only thing we can do about the past is learn from it so that we don’t repeat it. What Bengal fans should feel good about is that for the most part, ISU’s programs are doing well in the APR, and a plan is in place to round out the programs that are on the low end.

---Frank

Rolling out the red carpet for the fans....

Gang,

I hold in my hand a pair of contracts...contracts for websites. Very exciting stuff....I get the final presentation over the phone, and then hopefully one of these will be signed and sent to the company we are going with, and then it is a nine-week sprint to an August 1 launch date.

While I'm happy for Idaho State and the athletic department at the latest web evolution (as I mentioned in this blogpost, which also touches on a contest I entered), I'm excited for our fans. We can have a splash page! Drop downs with ticket information or alerts ... just some good things...but here is the deal. While the website has to serve Idaho State's functions for an athletic department, it needs to serve the fans as well, and that's where you guys come in.

Over the next 10 days or so, I'm going to be in Los Angeles for the LOST finale showing at the Orpheum Theater (and to get photos with my grand prize of the DHARMA Van from the show, since I won the video contest!), and then I'm headed to Arizona to serve as the official scorer for the Western Athletic Conference baseball tournament. I have asked the coaches of the various sports and teams what they want in a website...but what do you guys want? Is there anything on the web that you go "Why can't ISU have that?" All I ask is be reasonable knowing the limitations on dollars and staffing, but let me know, because it could be something I hadn't even thought of, and it could be very doable. I would prefer that you email me at mercfran@isu.edu, and in the subject line put WEBSITE IDEAS, so I can immediately save it in the right folder and I can identify what it is right away.

I know we are looking at incorporating our blogs, facebook , and twitter into the new site, I want rotating pictures on the stories on the front page, sport specific headers...heck, I'm kinda wanting different livestats ... but touch base on what you the fan want, or what you the parent want. As always, no guarantees, other than I will listen to everyone's suggestions.

With that, I've got laundry to do if I'm going to be on the same red carpet as Michael Emerson (and that's not even a lie!!!!)

---Frank