How surprising to see that UCF found a particular metric where UCF looks good at research and then disseminated it widely!?! I can patent a mold for rubber dog shit. Do we have a metric that assesses the quality along with quantity of those patents? Manipulating metrics is as common among universities as it is among corporations. (Tide gets your clothes 30% cleaner than other leading brands ...) Up the road in Jacksonville, UNF will tell you how incredibly awesome they are on all sorts of metrics. I know. I help them do this. Look here, you'll scroll forever: http://www.unf.edu/president/university-awards.aspx

Let's talk about metrics that can't be faked. Like where your faculty get their PhDs. A university is its faculty, and while they are probably better teachers, UCF professors do not compare with their counterparts at UF or FSU with respect to research. Hell, I'm sure UCF professors would admit that. That doesn't mean every UF professor is more likely to publish in a flagship journal than every UCF professor, but when you compare the means it simply isn't close.

UCF generally posts its ads for tenure track positions around the first of December. That is AFTER Florida State, Florida, and the nation's other major research universities have already finished hiring. UCF doesn't even compete for the same applicant pool. That's because they aren't worried about bagging big time researchers. They want great teachers. Because they are a teaching college.

Take me up on that $1000 to $500 deal though, I need the money.