More Bowl-Bound Football Teams Meet Academic Standards

But the racial gap worsened:

The academic performance of college football players on bowl-bound teams improved over all this year, compared with previous years, but the gap between white and African-American athletes increased slightly, says a new report from the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.

This year, 91 percent of the colleges participating in bowl games had at least a 50-percent graduation rate for their football teams, and 82 percent of the teams met the National Collegiate Athletics Association’s standard for academic progress, Richard E. Lapchick, the institute’s director, says in the report. Those figures compare with a graduation rate of 88 percent among last year’s teams, and a 73-percent rate on the academic-progress measure.