Basketball coaches, in particular, are lauding a quiet NCAA rules change requiring transferring athletes to maintain grades and eligibility at their original schools in order to qualify for scholarships at their new institutions.

The measure, which passed a year ago and became effective in August, is intended to bolster an academic reform movement that already has toughened requirements for incoming scholarship athletes, stepped up their progress-toward-degree requirements and, for the first time, subjected teams with lagging academic credentials to penalties.

Beyond improving the academic progress rates (APRs) computed for each of the more than 6,100 teams in Division I, coaches and other officials are hopeful the new requirement will slow the pace of player transfers. At Syracuse, men's basketball coach Jim Boeheim says a player plotting a move - he declined to identify him - was given pause by the new rule, finished the current semester of classes at Syracuse and now is reconsidering.

"It's possible a kid may rethink and say, 'It's not so bad here,' " says Boeheim, current president of the National Association of Basketball Coaches. "To me, it absolutely is a great rule, and not just because of the (impact on the) APR. Because of the overall welfare of the kid, too."

Says NCAA vice president Kevin Lennon, who oversees the APR program, "The idea is to finish what you start."

Under the NCAA's formula for computing APRs, each scholarship player on each team generally can earn two points per semester or term - one for remaining at the school, one for staying academically eligible. The transfer restriction is expected to reduce the number of "0-for-2" athletes and their drag on their teams' APR scores.

That could prove most consequential in men's basketball. Both its APR and player graduation rates are the lowest among 38 men's and women's sports tracked by the NCAA.

"We're all believing that this is going to have a pretty significant impact," says Jim Haney, executive director of the Kansas City, Mo.-based coaches' association. "It's good for the student-athlete who's transferring because it keeps him on target toward meeting those (progress-toward-degree) benchmarks. It's good for the school from which he's transferring because it's not going to get hung up on an 0-for-2. And it's good for the school to which he's transferring, because it's getting a kid who's on track (academically)."

A year ago, according to the NCAA, more than 3,700 Division I athletes left teams as academically ineligible 0-for-2s. That's about one of every 30 scholarship athletes overall. In basketball, it was roughly one in every 14; in football one in 17; and baseball one in 22.

How many went to other Division I schools and would have been affected by the new rule is uncertain, Lennon says. Some dropped out of school, some moved to junior colleges and others might have given up sports.