No, you are 100% wrong on pooling research grants and dividing it up like athletic media contract revenue, and so is anyone that suggests that happens in the Big Ten or anywhere else. It doesn't happen in any academic consortia because there are legal restrictions on every single extramural research grant that is obtained by an institution. The whole notion of this research funding pooling came from Big Ten fanboys reading a conference press release listing the combined figure of the total R&D $ of its schools. Research money has never been pooled and has never been shared like that, not ever, because that would violate the contractual terms of any granting agency, federal or private, and get a bunch of people thrown in jail for fraud and an institution banned from receiving future federal funds. Somehow the false idea still lingers around the internet like a lot of other incorrect ideas. Research grants are applied for by a faculty members, a principal investigator. There are often collaborating investigators at the same school or other schools need to perform specialized parts of the research (usually in the form of subawards when the faculty is at a different institutions). These collaborations are written into the proposals before they are submitted for review, require contractual agreements between institutions, and they are specifically to perform part of the research work. Athletic affiliations have absolutely zero to do with fostering these collaborations. Such collaborations are borne out of familiarity with colleagues in their fields of endeavor which occur during training or at academic society conferences and meetings or other types of academic interactions and not because two football teams play each other. The idea is ludicrous. Nor does conference affiliation actually lead to an increased ability for the faculty at a school to obtain research funding. For instance, since Penn State joined the Big Ten, their % share of overall federal research dollars has actually fallen. And while it is true that Ivory Tower administrators my prefer affiliations with institutions of similar stature, those affiliations don't do a damn thing to increase any school's competitiveness in a particular research space. It just flat out isn't how it works. Oregon State doesn't get any bounce because it plays Stanford, nor is Louisville climbing the any rankings because it plays Duke. The idea is stupid. ** Edited by CrazyPaco at 4/28/2023, 2:08:42 AM ** Edited by CrazyPaco at 4/28/2023, 2:11:59 AM