The University of Notre Dame can take heart in one area as its football team prepares to play Hawaii Dec. 24 in the Hawaii Bowl.

"If there were a national championship for graduation success rates among bowl teams, Navy and Notre Dame would have played for the National Championship," according to Rick Lapchick, a professor who analyzes academic results of student athletes for the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports.

Notre Dame and the U.S. Naval Academy (which will play Wake Forest in the Eagle Bank Bowl on Dec. 20) each graduated at least 94 percent of their football players and at least 93 percent of their African-American football players, according to Lapchick’s latest study.

Navy actually rated a 95 percent figure in the overall graduation rate for its football players, 1 percentage higher than the Irish.

The academic performance of college football players on bowl-bound teams improved overall this year, compared with previous years, but the gap between white and black athletes increased slightly, according to the report.

This year, 91 percent of colleges participating in bowl games had at least a 50 percent graduation rate for their football teams, and 82 percent of the teams met the standard for academic progress, according to Lapchick. That compares with a graduation rate of 88 percent among last year’s teams, and a 73 percent rate on the academic-progress measure.

Nineteen of the 68 bowl-bound teams (28 percent) graduated less than half of their black players, while one (University of Oklahoma) graduated less than half of its white players.

For the complete report, see: www.tidesport.org.