Please correct me if I am wrong, all the talk at the time was around if your university was a research school, which BYU was (and has been pointed out on this thread). BYU is careful as to what types of research grants those assoiciated to the school can apply for which does limit the amount of people and facilities used to engage in "research" related activites, but BYU is a research university so the agrument that it isn't is totally without merit. In my opion, it is used as a weak justification to why BYU didn't get an invite.
R1: "These institutions provide a lot of resources for research and have a lot of people conducting research at their respective institutions. These two classifications can be seen as the aggregate supply and aggregate demand of research, respectively.[3]"
R2: "These institutions either lack research facilities or do not have a lot of people conducting research at their respective institution."