I brought this up previously. Academic rankings (particularly US News & World Report) are heavily reliant upon "selectivity". Miami only takes (APPROXIMATELY) 3,000 undergrads each year. If 3,000 people apply, then you have 100% acceptance and 0% rejection. If 100,000 people apply, then you have 3% acceptance and 97% rejection. A school like Harvard gets a ton of applicants every single year, no matter how the football team does. But Miami has shown that when our football team does well, our number of applicants skyrockets.
Therefore, as much as a "true academic" would prefer to deny it, a good football program can actually have a large impact on academic rankings, at least ones that rely on the selectivity index of the Admissions Office.
It is not surprising that our academic rankings have slid as our football team has sucked. The combination of high tuition and "not enough good reasons (i.e., great football team) to apply to Miami" have conspired to kill our upward academic ranking trajectory. Meanwhile, the State of Florida continues to grow, thus the "good" state schools (UF and F$U primarily, but UCF and USF more recently) are benefitting from "increasingly selective admissions" as these big schools can only take so many admissions, and the applicant pool continues to grow each year.
I can assure you, there is NO ACADEMIC PROGRAM that is causing F$U to "rise" in the academic rankings, and there is nothing that Shalala or Frenk (I really don't like him) have done to decrease Miami's academic ranking...
EXCEPT...
For our football team tanking for the past 15 years.
