Searching for meaning behind UConn’s Graduation Success Rate

The annual freak out of UConn fans began on Wednesday when the AP reported that the men’s basketball program graduated just 20 percent of the players who entered between 2005 and 2008. That mark is by far the lowest of preseason Top 25 teams and nowhere close to the 2008 men’s basketball national average of 77 percent.

The AP story was quick to point out that 20 percent is up from a reported 17 percent last year and a reported 8 percent the year before.

Now that UConn is a few years into a newfound effort to steer more men’s basketball players toward graduation, many expect that number to keep rising over the next six-or-so years. Since being banned from the NCAA Tournament in 2012-13 due to poor Academic Progress Rate (APR) numbers, UConn has submitted perfect scores over the last two years.

UConn fans everywhere railed against the APR in 2013, but somehow, the Graduation Success Rate (GSR) is even more meaningless. Here’s how it works:

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• It measures all athletes who receive financial aid for athletics and enter a program during a four-year span (so this excludes walk-ons)
• Those athletes each have six years to graduate upon entering the program
• At this point, it’s simply a matter of dividing graduates by total players

Because the above is overly simplistic, there are caveats. If a player transfers out or leaves to play professionally while in “good academic standing,” then the school is not penalized. In this case, that player would not factor into the equation at all. This is, in itself, something of a penalty because someone who could be a star student cannot boost the university’s GSR just because he or she leaves for a better opportunity.

Also note that if it’s a transfer in good standing, then the player’s potential graduation becomes the responsibility of the next school. If the player transfers out of the program in poor standing, that is counted against the original school as a player who failed to graduate.

To further dilute the meaning of the GSR, these exceptions do not take into account players who fail to graduate or who leave in poor academic standing, but do go on to make millions of dollars playing their sport.

There is no way to fairly change the measurement to account for all of this because the GSR measures exactly what it says: graduation rate. It wouldn’t make sense to count an A student who leaves for the NBA Draft after his sophomore year as a graduate because, well, he is not.

In this way it seems that GSR is a lot like pitcher wins in baseball: it’s good when the number is high, but it tells such a small sliver of the story that reporting it at all is often more misleading than useful.

To further prove it, let’s try and figure out where UConn’s 20 percent GSR originates.

Please understand that because universities do not release individual academic records, we need to make a fair number of assumptions. I explain the logic behind them below, but bear in mind that it’s possible something in these calculations may have gone awry.

The 18 players who entered the program between 2005 and 2008 are:

Beverly is the only one who we know graduated for sure. I have not been able to confirm whether Austrie and Okwandu did as well, amid conflicting reports. They both might have.

Garrison and Johnson are two of the exclusions because they both transferred in good academic standing. UConn put the two of them on track to graduate, but this is not reflected in the GSR.

Contrary to the popular narrative, it is not believed that Walker graduated. Last we heard, he was a few credits shy of graduation and hoped to finish up in the summer following UConn’s 2011 championship. Because a fourth graduation would make it impossible to hit 20 percent with these numbers, it seems more likely that he did not graduate, but left in good academic standing. As was the case for Garrison and Johnson, this means UConn gets no credit for Walker, who worked hard enough to potentially graduate in three years.

Once you take the three of them out, you are left with 15 players.

This means there were two or three graduates out of 15. Saying there were three and crediting both Okwandu and Austrie would be easy, because it would give us 20 percent, as you can see below:

But there’s a problem. Remember that UConn reported a 17 percent GSR in 2014, which measured players who entered the program between 2004 and 2007. Excluding those we already know to exclude, here’s what that stretch looks like:

Using 15 players, there is no way you can come up with a 17 percent GSR. In fact, the only reasonable way to get there would be to both eliminate potential players and eliminate a graduation (so either Okwandu or Austrie did not graduate).

Going back and looking at last year’s numbers (and the year before that, the year of the 8 percent GSR) yields even more exclusions. For example just one of 12 eligible players in the 2013 GSR graduated. Josh Boone, Marcus Williams and Curtis Kelly are among them.

Based on hours of logic, research and assumptions, this appears to be what UConn reported to the NCAA each of the last three years, again with either Okwandu or Austrie graduating:

(Note: Okwandu is included in the 2006 cohort due to reporting from this article. If that turns out to not be true, then Austrie is the likely gradate.)

And this isn’t just a recent APR-era problem for UConn. The NCAA makes its GSR records public going all the way back to 2005 (measuring players between 1995 and 1998). In that time, UConn has never reported over a 50 percent rate, with most years the Huskies tracking in the 20s and 30s.

Of course, out of all the players measured in that time, 17 of them played in the NBA, the vast majority as non-graduates.

In the span shown above, Price, Villanueva, Gay and Adrien all hurt UConn, even though they made millions of dollars in the NBA, in part because of the time they spent in Storrs. Thabeet, Josh Boone and Marcus Williams did as well, and UConn did not have a chance to benefit from that on paper.

Then there’s Majok, Kelly, Dyson, Eaves and Edwards, who have all made careers overseas. Scottie Haralson, who I assume transferred in good standing, is now playing professionally in Canada after a short stint as a graduate assistant at Jackson State.

By any reasonable measure, UConn helped prepare each of those players for a real career. That is, after all, is the whole purpose of college in the first place. For a better look at whether or not the program prepared its players for life after UConn, see the below chart, courtesy of Microsoft Excel:

Don’t expect the numbers to reflect that any time soon, however. As I noted above, yes the numbers will generally rise over the next several years, but not dramatically and not immediately. Next year’s report will presumably include players who entered from 2006 to 2009. Nobody from the 2009-10 class (Alex Oriakhi, Jamal Coombs-McDaniel, Darius Smith, Jamaal Trice) graduated from UConn, though Orikahi and Coombs-McDaniel both left in good standing. The year after that, graduates Niels Giffey, Shabazz Napier and Tyler Olander enter the fray, but with them come non-grads Roscoe Smith, Enosch Wolf and Jeremy Lamb. Ryan Boatright and DeAndre Daniels come after that, neither of whom graduated (Andre Drummond is in that class as well, but should not count because he was technically a walk-on).

So keep that in mind when next year’s number is either 20 percent again, or maybe up to 25 percent, depending on how Darius Smith and Trice left. And regardless, take any improvements with a grain of salt. The higher the GSR the better, of course, but ultimately a low number means very little.