Which is the best college football conference in 2023?

AnalysisAll analysis →

Every FBS team is a dot. Conference averages are not shown, and that is the point: the SEC’s mean is dragged up by four teams, the Big Ten’s spread is twice the Sun Belt’s, and a bar chart of means says none of it. What “compare the conferences” actually asks is how much of one league sits inside the other.

MetricCORE overallCORE offenseCORE defenseOffense EPA/playDefense EPA/play allowedOffense success rateOffense explosivenessPoints per drivePoints per drive allowedAverage starting field positionThird down conversionTeam talent composite

Season2026202520242023202220212020201920182017201620152014

CORE offense · 2023

One dot per team, one tick per conference median. Leagues are ordered by median, and the mean is deliberately not shown — four teams drag it and it hides how far the two distributions overlap.

All leagues ACC American Athletic Big 12 Big Ten Conference USA FBS Independents Mid-American Mountain West Pac-12 SEC Sun Belt

Conference	Teams	Median	Spread	Best	Worst
SEC	14	8.6	15.7	LSU 31.3	-10.6
Big 12	14	4.2	13.4	Kansas 18.0	-9.4
Pac-12	12	2.8	21.5	Oregon 28.0	-8.5
ACC	14	2.1	10.5	Miami 8.0	-7.0
Sun Belt	14	0.115	10.4	App State 8.5	-17.1
Big Ten	14	-0.740	12.3	Michigan 15.6	-20.1
Mountain West	12	-1.3	8.2	Boise State 9.9	-20.4
American Athletic	14	-2.1	16.5	Memphis 8.3	-19.0
FBS Independents	4	-4.1	21.3	Notre Dame 14.3	-10.7
Conference USA	9	-6.5	10.9	Liberty 20.5	-11.8
Mid-American	12	-7.9	14.1	Toledo 7.3	-16.9

Two numbers, not one

Median answers “how good is this league”. Spread — the interquartile range — answers “how evenly good”, and it is usually the more interesting of the two. A league with a high median and a huge spread is four contenders and eight teams padding their records, which is exactly the shape that produces a conference champion who keeps losing in January.

Note which metric you are looking at. CORE is opponent-adjusted, so it can be compared across leagues honestly. The raw metrics cannot: a conference that plays itself twelve times has its schedule strength baked into every raw number, which is the single most common way conference comparisons go wrong.