re: The next time someone says Big 12 is smarter than SEC,

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Honestly, I have been REALLY surprised looking at these numbers... and pretty damned proud, too!

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As you should be. LSU does well in the research department. The only thing I'll say about these research rankings is that some schools get screwed on them because they're part of state mandated university "systems" where all the resources are shared among separate schools. That's why Alabama's #s for research funding are so low. Unlike most schools, Alabama (the main campus) doesn't get to count it's medical school research funding because technically its under the UAB umbrella when for years it was the UA School of Medicine located in Birmingham instead of "UAB School of Medicine". The same with aerospace engineering NSF funds for UAH (University of Alabama-Huntsville). The University of Alabama system is considered 3 separate campuses as opposed to 1 main campus and 2 other satellite campuses. For this reason, Alabama misses out on over $400,000,000 dollars annually of NIH funding that would count in its numbers.

The UA system, like many campus systems of flagship universities in states across the country, was set up to help the state the most economically. The way the state set it up (with the system's medical school and all its funding in Bham and the main NASA/aerospace engineering at the Huntsville campus for obvious reasons) actually hurts the main campus in the research numbers game.