Audio By Carbonatix

Listen closely, Phoenix. You can hear the chants as they echo off the Valley’s majestic mountain tops: “We’re Number 121! We’re number 121!”

Fans of Arizona State University and the Unversity of Arizona don’t find themselves chanting the same phrase too often, if ever. The rivalry between the two universities dates back to pre-statehood times. It’s unlikely that it’s going away anytime soon. But a new “best colleges” ranking by U.S. News & World Report has fans chanting the same tune. Neither party got bragging rights this year. The study found that Arizona’s two largest public universities are… well… tied.

U.S. News & World Report released its best colleges ranking on Tuesday. Both ASU and UA ranked 121st. The Arizona schools tied with 10 other universities for the mid-100s slot, including George Mason University in Virginia, Illinois Institute of Technology, Loyola University Chicago, the University of Texas at Dallas, the University of Central Florida and the University of Denver.

Nearly every Arizonan solidly places themselves in one of two camps. Some throw up a three-fingered “Forks Up” and quip about being “#1 in Innovation” (whatever the hell that means) after solving any problem. Others yell out a “Bear Down” when spotting someone wearing merch featuring the red-white-and-blue “A,” while slurping on a strawberry frozen treat from eegee’s.

Mixed-rivalry households are common. Siblings give each other the stare-down across their mother’s dining table at Thanksgiving ahead of the weekend’s Territorial Cup. Trash talk is inevitable. At the bar, new friends jokingly, but with a personal intensity, debate over which school is better, hotter or smarter.

This year’s report evaluated more than 1,700 U.S. colleges and universities by 17 factors to measure “academic quality and academic success,” according to its website. The rankings, which include more than 400 schools, rely on data from statistical surveys, the Department of Education and the Common Data Set Initiative, which is a data partnership between CollegeBoard, U.S. News and Peterson’s.

From this data, U.S. News ranks universities by weighing graduation rates, first-year retention rates, peer assessment, financial resources per student, faculty salaries, student-faculty ratio, standardized tests and other factors. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University and Harvard University ranked as the top universities in the country.

In recent years, ASU and UA have been flip-flopping in the report’s rankings. Last year, ASU bumped up a few slots to be the 117th-best university in the country. The largest university in the country — known for its “admit everybody” mentality — passed its rival UA. The Tucson-area basketball powerhouse fell 18 spots that year, coming in at 127th. The year prior, UA ranked higher than ASU.

This year, the two universities appear to have found a happyish middle ground — next to each other. ASU fell four slots, while UA’s ranking increased by six spots. Both schools still failed to break into the top 100, as did any of Arizona’s other universities on the list.

The report ranked the rivalries’ artsy Flagstaff-based cousin to the north as the 242nd-best university. Northern Arizona University fell more than 30 slots this year. The state’s scandal-plagued, religious university came somewhere between 395 and 434. Grand Canyon University doesn’t participate in the data sharing that is used in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings.

ASU and UA might be even, but look out! There’s sure to be a few elbows thrown ahead of next year’s ranking as the state’s top two public universities attempt to get ahead of one another.