As expected, the Kansas football program has been docked two scholarships for the 2008 recruiting year by the NCAA for coming in under the 925 APR minimum and having a couple of players bolt that were not in good academic standing. Don't worry, KU already had two scholarships hanging out there. The speculation was floating around earlier in the year, but it's pretty clear now that Mark Mangino and his staff had anticipated this and capped themselves at 20.

So what is the APR. Here is the KUsports.com take:

APR is calculated by giving athletes on scholarship one point per semester for remaining eligible and one point for remaining on campus. The points then are calculated for each team and divided by the highest possible point total. That percentage then is translated to another point total, with 1,000 being the highest. So, a multiyear score of 925 essentially means a team compiled 92.5 percent of all possible points over a four-year period.

A score under 925 doesn’t necessarily mean looming penalties. A program only is subject to penalties if its score is below 925 and an underclassmen fails to pick up a single point in a given semester — that is, leaves campus and leaves in poor academic standing.

Nice, huh? Seems like a great idea to essentially grade it on a curve, so we can always have some institutions in poor standing. Hey, the guys at the NCAA have to make a living as well.

Anyway, the key is that this is really all in the past for the KU football program -- the result of bringing in a pretty big JUCO class in 2003. A couple of people want to pin this on Mangino and I suppose essentially he made the call to go JUCO heavy early on. I'd say he aggresively attacked the plan of turning around a program that was stripped bare. In retrospect, I think Mangino has indicated that he would have done it differently now.

Most KU football fans have decent memory and it's not to difficult to recall 2003 scenario. Coming out of the 2002 season, it was clear that Bill Whittemore was a rare talent and with a little support, he could accelerate the growth curve for the program. With just one more year of eligibility, I even remember a local KC columnist scripting a piece begging Mangino to do what it took to get some talent in to take advantage of the opportunity. Of course, no one is condoning the academic fraud that occurred. It's unfortunate, but it was a self-reported mistake that was clearly an error in handling capacity. As for the impact on our APR scores, well that's just the way it goes. At this point, it's pretty much ancient history. Let the NCAA puff their chest out, but no one is fooled. This is a team with 14 Academic All-Big 12 players and next season that APR mark will be buried.