UCLA Enters B1G as the Top Academic School
What's Bruin Writings
When UCLA enters the Big 10 Athletic Conference in 2024, it will become the conference’s highest rated school according to a composite score of the generally accepted university rankings. Washington and USC will both enter in the top 10 , and Oregon … is 17th out of 18 universities.
Cal and Stanford bump Duke as the top academic school in the new ACC.
Texas (#10) supplants Vanderbilt (#14) as the top academic school in the new SEC.
The Big 12 is clearly the “dumbest” of the Power 5 conferences.
The Pac-12 was ripped down its seams a few months ago, and conference realignment continues to change college football in fundamental ways. As the former PAC teams are scattered across the country, old rivalries will likely drop away and groups of fans will be brought together for the first time (or the first time in a long time) to watch new match ups involving their favorite teams. In some cases, generations of trash talking, picked bones and sore subjects between fans will be put into cold storage, and ardent college football fans will have to develop new nits to pick with unfamiliar fan-bases.
Heading into the 2024 season, Bruin fans no longer have to worry about Chip Kelly or horrible upsets in Wildcat Stadium, and Trojan fans won’t have to take painful losses in Corvallis or Pullman. However, what fills the vacuum of all that baggage? In the past, when UCLA fans rolled into Corvallis or Seattle, we could remember how the last few match-ups went and cover up or talk trash accordingly. I remember Maurice Drew rushing for 322 yards and 5 TDs in Husky Stadium like it was yesterday; every 40 point loss in Tucson and SLC still hurts too. Being in a conference for all these years creates memories and scar tissue, and conference realignment has vaporized a good chunk of it.
For sure, some of these schools already have a rich inter-conference history with the teams they are joining with; USC has actually played more games against Ohio State than it has against Utah or Colorado, and no Bruin fan needs reminding of the sinister University of Wisconsin (the author will despise Ron Dayne forever). But what common ground do West Coast types really share with folks from Piscataway or Iowa City? What the hell do Stanford and Cal fans have to say to folks from NC State?
With icebreakers in mind, the What’s Bruin Show presents to you the 2023-24 Academic Rankings Composite (ARC). When encountering fans of team for the first time or that you haven’t had to interact with in a long time, nothing goes over better than telling them how much their school sucks compared to yours, right? Sure Clemson may have won two National Title’s in the past decade, but Stanford and Cal have been the top two academic schools in the Power 5 like infinity years in a row? - so suck it Tigers! UCLA’s tubby head coach just left Westwood and demoted himself to a Coordinator position in the same conference, and although Bruin fans are almost universally happy to see him go, it’s about as embarrassing of a coaching change that could be conceived. Who the hell knows when UCLA Football will top the AP Top 25 again, but how about being #3 in the ARC?!? Being the top academic dog in the B1G has to hold at least a little joy for Bruin fans as we are getting throttled in the Happy Valley next fall.
What exactly is the Academic Ranking Composite? Well, in the spirit of 24/7 Sports Recruiting Composite model that compiles and averages the various recruiting services from around the country and creates and average score, the ARC does the same using the national and global rankings that most of the more prestigious universities (generally the top 200) site on their own information pages. This composite score is composed of five national scores and four world rankings that are listed on most of these institutions Wikipedia pages (some universities didn’t list all nine, presumably because they scored poorly on a particular one and didn’t want to list it. Some of the universities also had outdated scores that dropped their overall rating). The rankings listed below are all the most recent numbers as of fall 2023, and they were averaged together to come up with a score reflecting a composite of all of the rankings.
Many people discount the academic rankings, and certainly if you’re looking for a school to attend you’d rather go to the one that has the highest rank in the particular subject you’re looking to study (Top 10 in Engineering, #4 in Public Policy, etc.), but regardless of how flawed any or all of these rankings might be, when someone wants to know how Purdue stacks up against Michigan in an academic sense, these are the rankings people look up; and once again, these are the rankings that the institutions themselves cite when bragging about being the top this or that in whatever they want to tout. When Pat Forde talks about Stanford and Cal being amongst the top universities in the world, these are the rankings he is invoking.
Funnily enough, just like the variance that occurs between ESPN’s Top 100 in recruiting compared to Rivals Top 250 or the 24/7 Sports Composite, a particular university’s scores can vary from one ranking organization to the next. There is a lot of room to grouse and split hair when averaging 9 different academic rankings. However, as previously stated, we are deferring to the judgement of the universities themselves as these are the rankings they acknowledge when they want to brag about how great they are. So in the author’s opinion, it seems like a reasonable idea to make a composite ranking of the most popular university ranking organizations in the style of the previously mentioned 24/7 Sports' Composite Rankings.
So with that in mind, UCLA will enter the Big 10 Conference as the highest ranking institution in the new 18 team conference according to the ARC. Washington enters as the 4th ranked school; USC is the 7th highest ranked school, and those Ducks of Oregon comes in 17th out of 18 Big 10 Schools (however, they still have Phil Knight, a terrific recruiting class and are presumably a real challenger to The Ohio State in 2024, so who needs brains, right?).
HERE IS THE ARC DATA FOR THE ENTIRE POWER 5 (CLICK HERE)
Some other observations:
Cal and Stanford bump Duke as the top academic school in the new ACC. This doesn’t come as much of a surprise, but it also obviously gives the conference a big bump in academic prowess, giving the conference three of the top four spots and four top 10 teams (second only to the B1G).
The Big 10 won the National Title in 2023 with Michigan’s big breakthrough, and adding UCLA, USC and Washington in 2024 will cement the B1G as the top academic Power 5 Conference with five top 10 schools and twelve top 20 schools.
Texas (#10) supplants Vanderbilt (#14) as the top academic school in the new SEC. This theoretically gives them some academic street cred, and gets the conference a third team in the ARC top 20.
Finally, (but not surprisingly?) the Big 12 is clearly the dumbest of the Power 5 conferences. The conference of dunces had to add ASU, Arizona, Colorado and Utah just to land a school in the top 35 of the ARC (the ARC clearly shows that the conference should have taken Oregon State and Washington State too, they fall right into the range the Big 12 covers in the rankings). Looks like Texas was a better match for the SEC than just on the football field after-all.
It’s OK Big 12 fans, your institutions may be academically challenged compared to the rest of the Power 5 (or should we start calling it the Power 4.2 until WSU and OSU find a home?), but Brett Yormark is heads and shoulders above anything the old Pac-12 or the current ACC has to offer. We wouldn’t be surprised if the Big 12 stretches from sea to shining sea in a couple of years after absorbing the ACC and the Pac 2.
However, until that time let’s remember that although UCLA Football has underachieved for two and a half decades, WE ARE NUMBER ONE IN THE B1G (in academics)!!!! Suck it EVERYONE ELSE!!
US News & World Report - 2022-2023 Best Global Universities Rankings
247Sports.com’s explanation of the Composite Rankings: The 247Sports Composite Rating is a proprietary algorithm that compiles prospect "rankings" and "ratings" listed in the public domain by the major media recruiting services. It converts average industry ranks and ratings into a linear composite index capping at 1.0000, which indicates a consensus No. 1 prospect across all services.
This author’s degrees are in the liberal arts, but he can sum 9 numbers and average the results with the best of them. He did finish this article on vacation, so please cut hi some slack on any minor errors.
Enjoyed the article and sent to fellow alum
Dang that's an A+ paper