Rodney Allison

At the end of every practice, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football coach Rodney Allison will bellow, at least once, “Go to class!” to his players as they leave the field.

The message hasn’t always gotten through in his five-plus seasons, but if the new NCAA Academic Progress Rate numbers released Tuesday are any indication, that might not be the case any longer. The football team raised its APR score 112 points to 928 in 2006-07, up from 816 in 2005-06, putting it slightly above the NCAA’s benchmark of 925.

The big jump didn’t prevent the NCAA from hitting the program with a historical penalty for its poor numbers in the previous three years, due largely to players either being asked or forced to leave the program while not in good academic standing. However, it was a big, long-awaited step in the right direction, Allison said.

“I thought we made great improvements,” he said, “and it’s by far the best year we’ve ever had (since the APR was instituted four years ago).”

In the initial APR report, from the 2003-04 academic year, the Mocs’ score was 866, well below the benchmark, but no schools were punished after the numbers were released. The following two years, UTC had an APR of 816, which drew a contemporaneous penalty of 6.3 scholarships — 10 percent of the Football Championship Subdivision’s maximum of 63 per team — each time.

Now, because the football program’s multiyear APR is 855, it received a historical penalty that included the loss of 2.5 percent of its scholarships, which amounts to a little less than two, and it lost two hours of practice time each week, dropping from 20 to 18.

Allison said the loss of the practice time won’t sting as much as the loss of scholarships, which is expected to leave the team with 57, according to athletic director Rick Hart.

“I’ve already come up with a plan for (the lost time). That includes everything you do: weightlifting, meeting time — when it’s all said and done, you’re probably not going to (use) 20 hours anyway,” Allison said. “I don’t like it, but I can deal with that.”

While the term “APR” is not mentioned to the players very often by the coaches, junior wide receiver Blue Cooper said, academics has always been a point of emphasis during his time at UTC.

“Coach Allison is always on us about the academics; ‘Go to class,’ that’s always the end of his speech (at the end of practice),” said Cooper, who is taking three classes during this summer school session. “Since I got here, Coach Allison has always been a big academic guy, but probably more so in the last year or so.”

Allison is entering the final year of his contract and because of the penalties will have to do more with less against a daunting schedule that includes games against Oklahoma and Florida State, as well as three-time defending FCS national champion Appalachian State.