Willie Taggart gives props to players for successful academic semester

FSU football has the lowest APR score among the Power Five schools in 2017-18. Willie Taggart wants people to know progress is being made to correct it.

FSU football began to slide on the football field about the same time they began to slide off the football field.

The Noles routinely had one of the worst APR scores among Power Five schools under Jimbo Fisher.

It came as no surprise when news broke this week his final season culminated in FSU football having the worst APR score among the Power Five.

A terrible APR score is something that will take years to fix. Think of it as a college student that’s attempted a lot of credit hours who’s trying to raise their GPA quickly.

It’s not going to happen not matter how well the student performs now if it’s established they have not performed well in the past. It’ll take semester after semester how excellent grades to eventually see that GPA rise a noticeable amount.

The same holds true for the APR score.

Coach Taggart is aware of the perception that comes with the low score although it’s of no fault of his own since the latest numbers where under the old regime.

However, he took to social media Friday to publicly acknowledge players who excelled this past semester. Apparently there were 24 FSU football players who achieved a 3.0 or better this past spring semester.

All 24 of them were addressed in this manner:

Thoughts

I think it’s great Willie Taggart addressed this situation in this manner. He had made it a point to emphasize the importance of academics since his arrival in December 2017.

It provides evidence that work is being done by these student athletes in the classroom. This means 28 percent of the team (24 of 87) had a 3.0 or higher this spring.

I should also point out that none of the players Willie Taggart signed since the 2018 recruiting class have been lost to grades that I’m aware of.

That’s the point I made earlier this week. If the coaches are recruiting players that understand and believe in the importance of performing in the classroom, that’s half the battle in getting student athletes to persist semester to semester.