[dontbenebby]

>> That’s not where T14 comes from.

>There have been rare exceptions to this, however, such as UCLA School of Law appearing in the top fourteen instead of Cornell and Northwestern in 1987 and University of Texas School of Law displacing Georgetown in 2018, although the significance of these changes has been debated.

People select measures for a number of reasons. It's perfectly possible the single and only reason T14 is used is for the reasons you lay out.

OTOH I have personally had conversations with people who argued that the T14 is a measure of merit when Georgetown was in the T14 then "debated the significance" of the measure when Georgetown dropped out of the top 14 in 2018.

It was not clever or endearing.