Greg Schiano and Bob Mulcahy celebrate the triumphs of RU football....

Rutgers athletics is getting some good publicity with its performance in the recently released APR ratings.  For those of you all of you who are unfamiliar with what the Academic Progress Rate ratings are, here you go:

The APR provides a real-time look at a team’s academic success each semester or quarter by tracking the academic progress of each student-athlete. The APR includes eligibility, retention, and graduation in the calculation and provides a clear picture of the academic culture in each sport. High-performing teams receiving public recognition awards this year posted APR scores ranging from 976 to a perfect 1,000.

Rutgers football was the highest acheiver among RU athletics scoring a 980 total, placing it 3rd nationally among Football Bowl Division schools.  The top five looks like this:

1.  Stanford (984)

2.  Air Force (983)

3.  Rutgers (980)

     Duke (980)

5.  Rice (979)

But Rutgers football wasn't the only sport to score well.  Paul Franklin writes that several other sports programs were among the nation's elite in APR rankings:

Several other programs at the state university placed high nationally as well, with top 10 rankings being achieved by men’s cross country, women’s tennis and women’s gymnastics. Top 20 rankings included women’s cross country, field hockey, men’s indoor and outdoor track and men’s basketball.

Franklin also believes that the success of the football team academically can be credited to both Greg Schiano and Bob Mulcahy who had visions of success both on and off the field:

Not that long ago the Rutgers football program lost as many recruits to academics as it did to Penn State, Syracuse and West Virginia. Not long ago the graduation rate at our state university was lower than the New York Mets’ winning percentage.

That was before Greg Schiano was hired.

That was before former director of athletics Bob Mulcahy hired Schiano.

 

......

""One of the things that was clear from the beginning is that Bob and I were on the same page, that we were partners in what we were doing," Schiano said. ""We didn’t agree on everything, but there was certainly a partnership there. The academic part of it, the athletic part of it, all that stuff takes a lot of planning, a lot of work, a lot of commitment, and Bob’s been, as I’ve said many times, there every step of the way."

To me it still makes absolutely no sense that Bob Mulcahy is not the Athletic Director at Rutgers anymore.  All he did was oversee a substantial boom in Rutgers Athletics during his tenure (football, women's basketball, etc.), while seeing the academic progress rise to unprecedented highs.  Yes, there was some "eyes bigger than our stomach" spending, but President McCormick was along for the ride on that too, why wasn't he fired, or even reprimanded?  It's a great honor that Rutgers is earning these awards and accolades that Schiano and Mulcahy worked so hard towards, it's just a rotten shame that Mulcahy's not there to receive them.