re: Would you rather your school be ranked #1 in football or academics?

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not at all. acceptance rate is a meaningless statistic, when it comes to ease of acceptance. They dont accept based upon a certain percentage of applicants

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That's just ridiculous. Yes, schools have means of manipulating their acceptance rate, and other factors (such as the number of applicants in toto) play a part. But there is a fairly demonstrable correlation between acceptance rates and the difficulty of getting into a school. With a few outliers, there's also a demonstrable correlation between academic reputation and acceptance rates. If there weren't, the top schools wouldn't be so difficult to get into. Vanderbilt accepts something like 13% of applicants because it rejects ones below a certain threshold, not because it decided that "13%" would be a super-awesome percentage to settle on. The Ivies have even lower acceptance rates, and more formidable academic criteria.

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What? size of the school has nothing to do with the quality of the school or ease of entrance

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This is just basic common sense. Keeping in mind that I said "a relevant factor", think about it for a second. Unless there is a severe disparity in application numbers, two roughly equivalent schools with a significant disparity in student body populations will necessarily show a disparity in acceptance rate. One of the reasons OSU has 60k students is because they accept more than half their applicants. If they accepted, say, 13% of their applicants, their student body would be roughly 15k.