How the University of Minnesota fared on the WSJ’s “Grid of Shame”

The Gophers edged into truly respectable territory for the first time in this year's Wall Street Journal Grid of Shame.

The grid, based on information compiled by the paper, rates football teams from 125 major colleges in their performance both on the field and off.

The horizontal axis shows how strong the colleges and universities are athletically. Pretty standard stuff.

The vertical axis is more interesting -- and is what prompts the graphic's name. It hows how schools have done in academics and behavior, among other things.

More specifically, the Journal notes:

The shame component is based on five categories: each team's four-year Academic Progress Rate (APR) figure, the metric the NCAA uses to assess academic performance; recent history of major violations and probation; percentage of athletic-department revenues subsidized by student fees; number of player arrests in the off-season, and a purely subjective, overall "ick" factor. (Sorry, Penn State.)

Not sure how that's all weighted -- especially the subjective "ick" component.

As you can see, the University of Minnesota  football squad is in the upper-right quadrant, slightly above middling in athletic performance, but solidly admirable off the field.

That's an improvement over the past two years -- especially compared with 2011, when the U started off athletically weak and halfway to peel-off-the-window-sticker territory.

(Compared with the University of Wisconsin, however -- ouch.)

You can read the article from this year here and see the full interactive image here.

For a look at the U's past performance, check out the 2011 debut map and article here and the 2012 version here.

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