Terrapin Football Squad Receives Academic Honor
6/8/2004 8:00:00 AM | Football
June 8, 2004
COLLEGE PARK, Md. - The University of Maryland football team earned honorable mention from the American Football Coaches Association recently for achieving a graduation rate above 70 percent for the five-year period ending this spring.
Maryland was one of 31 NCAA Division I institutions out of the 94 responding to the AFCA survey which achieved a graduation rate of at least 70 percent. The overall graduation rate for the survey group was 59 percent, similar to the previous year.
"We are proud of our program in this key goal area," said Deborah A. Yow, director of athletics at the University of Maryland. "Coach Friedgen and I agree that graduating our football student-athletes is as important as winning the Atlantic Coast Conference. We believe both can be achieved."
According to the AFCA survey, of the 1,154 student-athletes entering as freshmen in the 1998-99 academic year, 23 percent graduated in four years or less, 31 percent required 4-1/2 years and 34 percent needed five years. Another 12 percent graduated in five-plus years, a period extending through the summer of 2003.
The AFCA rates are calculated on a different formula than those of the NCAA, taking into account student-athletes who received scholarships after their initial year or who transferred from another institution and subsequently received a grant-in-aid.
Boston College and Northwestern reported a 100 percent graduation rate over the survey period. As such, those institutions will receive the AFCA Academic Achievement Award, presented by the Touchdown Club of Memphis.
Three other institutions - Notre Dame, Oklahoma State and Wake Forest - achieved a rate of 90 percent or better.
The American Football Coaches Association has been conducting the graduation-rate survey since 1998. From 1981 through 1997, the College Football Association membership was surveyed. Only twice has the overall graduation rate been better than the 59 percent announced in the recent survey. Football teams surveyed in 2002 graduated 60.2 percent, and the 1993 survey reported a 59.1 percentage rate.
