Missouri State President takes some blame off Bobby Petrino for football's low APR

Missouri State President Clif Smart said he is disappointed in the football program's low Academic Progress Rate that has the team possibly facing a postseason ban in 2024 if it doesn't improve.

However, Smart is not one who will point the blame at Bobby Petrino, the former head coach who was in charge during the years that has the Bears on the brink of facing NCAA sanctions.

In fact, Smart pointed some of the blame at himself and those in charge around him.

"I think he came into a situation where he didn't have players that could win," Smart said. "I don't care how good of a coach you are, if you don't have players, you can't win. I think we could have supported him better through some of that and put some constraints on him."

Missouri State currently has a multiyear score of 927 which is under the NCAA's required score of 930 to be eligible for postseason play. Penalties, however, have been delayed for several years in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the introduction of the transfer portal. Penalties will return and be issued in spring 2024.

Athletics Director Kyle Moats recently said the school hopes it will receive relief or there will be adjustments to the Academic Progress Rate (APR) rules in response to the pandemic and transfer portal.

The drop in the Bears' APR is due to its lack of retention, not its GPA, which followed a major roster overhaul when Petrino was first hired and took over a team that went 1-10 the year before.

Petrino did not have a poor history of APR scores prior to being hired at Missouri State. He had multiple individual seasons that fell below the 930 mark but the APR takes into account a four-year average. His two announced single-year APRs at Missouri State were 908 and 899.

APR is a measure the NCAA calculates with the following:

"Each student-athlete receiving athletically related financial aid earns one point for staying in school and one point for being academically eligible.

"A team’s total points are divided by points possible and then multiplied by 1,000 to equal the team’s Academic Progress Rate."

Petrino departed the Missouri State football program following his third season as head coach to take an offensive coordinator position at UNLV before taking the same position at Texas A&M a few weeks later. Ryan Beard, his son-in-law, was promoted to head coach and retained the majority of the staff and the eligible roster from the 2023 season.

"Bobby Petrino is a hard coach to manage, he's a great coach and became a friend and I don't mean that as criticism," Smart said. "He's just driven to win. If we need a player, he's is going to figure out how to get that player, within the rules, to win. A lot of these graduate transfer players came and played a year and left and didn't make progress on their degree and that hurts your APR numbers. We'll have less of that."

Among the strategies Smart believes the Bears will start taking is recruiting players who will be committed to the university for four-to-five years along with taking players from junior colleges who are typically at the school for multiple years.

Smart pointed out the number of local athletes who will play at Missouri State this season as those who are more likely to stay with the team. The school added five scholarship players and a handful of preferred walk-ons from the region.

Smart doesn't believe the number will be a problem in the future.

"That's a disappointing number," Smart said. "Coach Petrino had to do things to get players here, to get started. Unfortunately, many of those players didn't make academic progress and now we have to manage that. We needed that 'hey, we can win, we can be competitive' and now we've gotta make sure we're giving athletes a chance to get that credential and I think we'll see Ryan start recruiting more locally."

Wyatt D. Wheeler is a reporter and columnist with the Springfield News-Leader. You can contact him at 417-371-6987, by email at wwheeler@news-leader.com or Twitter at @WyattWheeler_NL.