"Academics" often works as shorthand for academic profile/mission/goals. I work in biotech where we basically differentiate among three types of labs...government, industry, and academic. Those academic labs may have zero effect on the quality of education at their institutions other than for
maybe a few grad students. We still call them academic, and I think that naming convention is true also when referring to the academics of a university.
Obviously, you hope that "success" at the top (turning out PhDs and, most importantly, bringing in research $$$) trickles down to the quality of undergraduate education, at the very least in terms of opportunities offered. Of course, that isn't always the case.
"Academics" in terms of book learnin' is a separate, but related, dimension on which we can evaluate schools. That's where we'd look at what is expected of students in order to be at the school in the first place and especially to graduate. There are colleges like Amherst and Vassar (among many others) that are going to be viewed as academically superior to every school in the Belt when you look at academics from this angle, while they may fall short when referring broadly to "academics" as it often gets used as shorthand for the volume of scholarly activity that takes place at an institution.
And yet we keep having the exact same conversation on message boards.