Ohio State is college football’s top team in more ways than one.
On the field, the Buckeyes are the reigning College Football Playoff national champions. In the classroom, Ohio State is the only Division I football team with a perfect multi-year Academic Progress Rate of 1000.
Ohio State football is the only Division I football program with an APR score of 1,000
— Ohio State Buckeyes (@OhioStAthletics) May 6, 2025
The APR accounts for academic eligibility, retention and graduation and provides a measure of each team's academic performance.
: https://t.co/HLOiVWJJAF | @OhioStateFB
While Harvard was tied with Ohio State for the top APR last year, the Crimson now rank third among Division I football programs with an APR of 997, with the Alabama Crimson Tide ranking second (998).
The football team is one of seven Ohio State sports teams that currently has a perfect multi-year APR of 1000. The men’s and women’s cross country, men’s fencing, men’s golf, women’s soccer and women’s volleyball teams also have perfect multi-year APRs. Across all sports, Ohio State has a multi-year rate of 990.
Each team’s Academic Progress Rate is based on the academic eligibility, retention and graduation of its scholarship athletes. The current multi-year APR scores are based on a multi-year average of each team’s rates from the 2020-21, 2021-22, 2022-23 and 2023-24 academic years.
Ohio State athletic director Ross Bjork thinks it’s no coincidence that Ohio State football’s success on the field has gone hand in hand with its excellence in the classroom.
“If you're doing one thing in your life at the highest level, you're going to do everything else at the highest level,” Bjork told Eleven Warriors in April. “No one's going to take a day off. No one's going to take a shortcut. So if you just look at our football team, look at our women's hockey team; women's hockey has led the department in cumulative team GPA, and we've been in six out of the last seven Frozen Fours, won two out of the last four national championships. Football had the highest GPA (in program history) last spring, last fall, they're on track this spring to have a really great GPA, and we just won the national championship. So again, correlation between excellence in one category – academic, social life, whatever – is going to bleed over into the athletic realm.”
