Is there any other field where everyone knows the top two departments are at non-"brand name" universities

Thanks to the PGR, everyone knows that NYU and Rutgers are the top two departments in American philosophy.    In most other disciplines, the "top two or three" departments are always some mix of Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Caltech, Chicago, Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley, Yale, sometimes also Michigan, Penn or UCLA.  NYU and Rutgers dominate no other fields the way they dominate philosophy.  This is one of many things that make complaints about "prestige bias" in philosophy so odd:  the prestige in the PGR era actually tracks the quality of the faculties, not the reputation of the university as a whole.  This is particularly striking in the humanities, where being a "brand name" university seems to be decisive in most other fields for preeminence.   (In the natural sciences, it seems easier for non-"brand name" schools to be recognized as excellent, perhaps because the criteria for important contributions are clearer and less pedigree-sensitive.)

To be sure, prior to the PGR, one non-elite university did pull off moving to the top:  namely, Pittsburgh.  (Arizona almost did it starting in the 1970s, and solidified those gains in the 1990s as a "top ten" department during the PGR era.)  UC Irvine did carve out a niche for itself in literary theory by raiding Yale (much as Pittsburgh raided Yale in the early 1960s), but not in English or comparative literature generally.  Email me if you can think of any other examples in the humanities.

So prior to the PGR it was rather hard to pull off preeminence in philosophy if you weren't already "Ivy League" or Stanford or MIT or Chicago.   And both NYU and Rutgers used PGR results to demonstrate to their administrators that they really were improving the strength of their programs.  In addition, of course, many programs outside the very top ones utilized the PGR to show that investments in specific areas of philosophy really did improve a program's standing.   Quite apart from the huge benefit for students, the PGR has also been a huge boon for departments competing for resources against departments without reliable and au courant metrics of success and excellence.