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

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Agreed, and that point was noted in the AAU discussion I linked.

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"All SEC schools are currently classified as RU/VH institutions with the exception of Alabama, Auburn, and Mississippi, which are all classified as RU/H. (NOTE: UA Birmingham and UA Huntsville are both considered separately from UA Tuscaloosa in the NSF study, and are both classified as RU/VH)."

I have no idea why the UA system let things evolve this way but they did. Putting the medical school in Bham was an obvious move as it makes sense to locate the med school in the state's largest metro and the aerospace engineering focus in Huntsville makes sense for obvious reasons. It would have been nice for the main UA campus to get credit for what was essentially their medical school but I guess it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. Whether it's called the UA School of Medicine or the UAB School of Medicine, it's still an economic and research juggernaut benefiting the state as a whole.

FWIW, the University of Alabama's research for all campuses was $539.5 million (2009 numbers). Over $430 million of that is from UAB alone so you can see why there are some hard feelings from the main campus with the way UAB has seemingly hijacked the system's medical school and therefore NIH funding numbers from the main campus. I wish Alabama would play along with the numbers game and simply report as the University of Alabama "all campuses" as many other schools do. Having said that, it probably has to do with the system being comprised of "separate" campuses as opposed to "sattelite" campuses. It's all semantics but it sure does make a big difference in the numbers.

Excellent research btw.