Baylor Football Leads Big 12 Conference in APR

Just a few minutes ago, the NCAA released its long-awaited APR report for all member institutions and their qualifying programs, spurring a flurry of activity on twitter about which teams placed where and received what score. ESPN's Brett McMurphy, in particular, took to the twitterverse to organize the football teams by conference. One of his tweets included the Big 12, where TCU and Baylor tied for the lead in APR with a 962 (on a scale to 1000) and UT, ISU, and OSU brought up the rear with 936, 928, and 926, respectively. The big surprise in that grouping is obviously UT, who not only finished near the bottom of the conference but also scored in the bottom 10 of all BCS schools. It's not something that will get Mack Brown fired, but it may play a role should it get any worse or they need more ammo to get rid of him eventually.

Using the search tool on the NCAA website, I narrowed the info down to a list of Baylor's programs in each of the relevant years, beginning for most programs in 2004-2005 and ending in 2011-2012, the last reported year. I'm proud to say that almost uniformly, our programs trended upward over the period, with football and basketball being the biggest movers. The football team's progress has been remarkably consistent, especially since Art Briles and company came aboard, something I can only expect to continue.

Something else I found interesting was the fact that football, while tied for the lead in the conference, was actually the lowest score among all of our programs. The highest was softball with a perfect score of 1000, and Baylor had 7 other programs (women's golf, men's golf, baseball, men's cross country, women's soccer, women's tennis, and women's volleyball) achieve a score over 980.

Congratulations, Bears. This may not be earth-shattering news, really, but it's nice to see hard work rewarded.