Someone who played college football — or who understands the arcane stupidities of NCAA football rules for some other reason — will have to explain this WP story to me:

The Howard University football team was one of 218 Division I programs sanctioned by the NCAA yesterday for failing to meet academic standards. …

The NCAA yesterday unveiled the latest batch of Academic Progress Rate (APR) scores, which measure how well a team returns academically eligible athletes semester to semester, as well as the sanctions imposed on underachievers.
[...]
… Howard’s football team will lose 2.91 scholarships because of an APR score of 916 (the magic number you need to hit is 925, which “equates roughly to a 60 percent graduation rate”).

How exactly do you lose 2.91 scholarships? With your left hand you take away three scholarships, but with your right hand you give one 9% scholarship? (Or maybe NCAA rules require you to give three 3% scholarships?) Eric Prisbell, who wrote the WP story, spent a lot of time explaining a lot of other stuff, but he didn’t even try to address the non-integer scholarship. Not how the NCAA rocket scientists came up with 2.91 in the first place, not how this delightful penalty gets imposed in practice.