The academic performance of college football players on bowl-bound teams improved over all this year, compared with previous years, but the gap between white and African-American athletes increased slightly, says a new report from the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.

This year, 91 percent of the 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 National Collegiate Athletics Association’s standard for academic progress, Richard E. Lapchick, the institute’s director, says in the report. Those figures compare with a graduation rate of 88 percent among last year’s teams, and a 73-percent rate on the academic-progress measure.

Despite those improvements, the latest study also shows “that the huge gap between white and African-American football student-athletes remains a major issue,” Mr. Lapchick wrote. Nineteen of the 68 bowl-bound teams (28 percent) graduated less than half of their African-American players, while only one, the University of Oklahoma, graduated less than half of its white players.

Among all 120 teams in the NCAA’s most competitive division, the report says, the graduation rate for white players this year was 76 percent, compared with 59 percent for black players. The gap between those figures is three percentage points wider than it was last year, when the rates were 64 percent for white players and 50 percent for black players. —Charles Huckabee