I really don't get this. I garduated from a Big 12 school and from UConn. Tulane is an urban school in the heart of New Orleans. It has an enrollment of less than 9,000. It's a really good school, but couldn't be less like UConn. Tulsa is semi-urban (if you can call Tulsa urban in any respect) and is smaller still. SMU is small and urban. All are private and UConn is public. If you are using academics and athletics, the school UConn is most like in the Big XII is Texas (#52, and #57 USNEWS). But clearly their 40k enrollment is huge. So the closest overall fit (despite an acadmic gap of #57 to #101) are Kansas and OU. Enrollment is about the same. Yes, UConn is about the same size as KU and OU (and enrollment is growing much faster at UConn). I am counting undergrads.
So perhaps we wouldn't be so sensitive, if you stopped comparing UConn to small private schools. It's obviously what you perceive. But the reality is quite different. It is a land grant university that started with an agricultural focus, just like all the major state universities in the midwest. It's also in a rural setting, not urban. I brought several friends from Kansas back to Connecticut and they were all surprised at what they saw. Yes, along I-95, it is densely populated and looks like the gateway to NYC that it is. But the state is heavily forested, and not all what they imagined, and that certainly includes Storrs.