Part of the responsibilities of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) relates to academics of student-athletes. The NCAA currently has a sliding scale of high school GPAs and SAT/ACT scores is in place, and a student-athlete must fall somewhere on the scale to be admitted to an institution. However, the NCAA had previously not had a mechanism in place to track student-athlete academic progress while they were enrolled. In 2004, the NCAA introduced the academic progress rate (APR) to track the progress of student-athletes, and a score is assigned to each individual team. Successful teams with high APR scores are publicly commended, but those with low APR scores face potential penalties. This study aims to look at the APR scores for football and mens basketball teams in the Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) and discern what characteristics, both organizational and financial, are associated with those scores. It also looks at a group of teams in each sport that have the lowest APR scores, which are termed to be in APR trouble, and determines what characteristics are associated with this low performing group, and if increased financial investment helps these teams more than other teams not in this group. Finally, it looks to see of previous financial investment leads to change in later versions of APR scores The results show that APR scores themselves have been steadily increasing from year to year, that graduation rate and athletic spending per athlete are associated with the APR scores of football teams, and that institutional funding for athletics per athlete is associated with the APR scores of basketball teams. In addition, those teams in APR trouble are typically part of the lower resourced Group of 5 conferences in Division I FBS, are typically public institutions, and typically smaller than the non-trouble counterparts. Although financial investment for APR trouble teams did not have the expected effects, institutional funding for athletics in years prior did show some association with models in both football and basketball. INDEX WORDS: academic progress rate, APR, NCAA, football, mens basketball, Division I, FBS