[Canalejas]

Well, I'm definitely on the obsolete side of things because I can't stop looking at old ways of thinking.  Or rather, I enjoy seeing my school near the top of cool lists and like making tables about them.  Here are three more of Top 50ish schools, this time using rankings from QS, Times Higher Education, and USNWR Global.  It's remarkable how much these lists of the usual suspects coincide with NSF funding.  







Taken all together, if we still want our athletics image to be tied to being in a club of good to great research schools, it points to what our best fit options are at each level of athletics competition:  

Get in the game at the top level, P2 ---> Big Ten
Try to keep pace at that next level down ---> ACC, and to a lesser extent BigXII
Try independence ---> poach the Big West UCs to form a new non-football conference
Give up on scholarship sports and then realize how geography and/or closed clubs leave us without realistic landing spots ---> Ivy League dreaming, faraway D3 options

[Canalejas]

Well, I'm definitely on the obsolete side of things because I can't stop looking at old ways of thinking.  Or rather, I enjoy seeing my school near the top of cool lists and like making tables about them.  Here are three more of Top 50ish schools, this time using rankings from QS, Times Higher Education, and USNWR Global.  It's remarkable how much these lists of the usual suspects coincide with NSF funding.  







Taken all together, if we still want our athletics image to be tied to being in a club of good to great research schools, it points to what our best fit options are at each level of athletics competition:  

Get in the game at the top level, P2 ---> Big Ten
Try to keep pace at that next level down ---> ACC, and to a lesser extent BigXII
Try independence ---> poach the Big West UCs to form a new non-football conference
Give up on scholarship sports and then realize how geography and/or closed clubs leave us without realistic landing spots ---> Ivy League dreaming, faraway D3 options