No madness here: BYU cracks Final Four — for academics

Looking for an upset in your March Madness bracket?

How about 14th-seeded Ohio toppling powerhouse Georgetown? Or lowly Vermont taking down a top-ranked Syracuse squad?

What about a BYU run to the Final Four?

Or how about Cornell matching up with Wofford for a shot at the Sweet 16?

You would have to be foolish, right?

Or maybe brilliant.

If the annual NCAA Tournament were played in the classroom instead of on the court, those picks would be safe bets, according to InsideHigherEd.com's annual Academic Performance Tournament bracket.

"It was pretty fair to say we were the only pool in which some of these small, more academically elite schools were winning," says editor and founder Doug Lederman, whose annual bracket has regularly tapped Einsteins as Cinderellas and seen Davidsons topple hardwood Goliaths.

Inside Higher Ed selects winners by using the NCAA's Academic Progress Rate, a metric that awards points for players who remain in good academic standing and stay enrolled from semester to semester.

BYU's 991 APR puts the team in 90th percentile of collegiate hoops programs — good enough for victories over North Texas, Xavier and Vanderbilt on a run to the Final Four. There, the Cougars would run into a Kansas Jayhawks team that would eventually go on to beat Duke in the academic championship game.

Utah State, meanwhile, is in just the 30th percentile with an APR of 922. That score means the Aggies would find themselves in a situation BYU fans know all too well: falling to Texas A&M in the first round of the tournament.

The way the NCAA has monitored its athletes' success has changed over the years, Lederman said, and so too has the way the publication picks its winners.

Rather than focusing simply on graduation rates, the NCAA began using the Academic Progress Rate in 2005 as "more real-time" means of tracking. The result, at least for Inside Higher Ed's bracket, has been an academic rise among traditional basketball powers who might once have fallen to Holy Cross or Bucknell.

"The stakes are a lot higher because these programs can lose scholarships," Lederman said. "In our bracket, we have ended up having these very strong basketball programs do very well. We don't have nearly the upsets anymore."

Last year, Inside Higher Ed selected North Carolina as its champion. The Tar Heels went on to win the tournament on the court.

"You could do worse," Lederman said of his bracket.

e-mail: afalk@desnews.com