On a day when the three-time national champion Connecticut's men's basketball team and nine other men's basketball teams were banned from postseason play for poor grades, Northwestern football coach Pat Fitzgerald found out his team's Academic Progress Rate (APR) was ranked No. 1 among both FBS and FCS programs.

As a whole, eight of NU's 19 athletic programs scored a perfect 1,000 and no NU program had a score below 983.

Those with perfect APR's were men's golf, women's cross-country and softball.