Which is the best college football conference in 2025?

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

Defense EPA/play allowed · 2025

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	16	0.089	0.095	Oklahoma -0.039	0.250
Big 12	16	0.115	0.091	Texas Tech -0.073	0.264
FBS Independents	2	0.116	0.173	Notre Dame 0.030	0.203
Pac-12	2	0.135	0.075	Washington State 0.098	0.172
ACC	17	0.140	0.133	Miami 0.024	0.283
Big Ten	18	0.147	0.128	Ohio State -0.021	0.301
Mid-American	13	0.149	0.099	Toledo -0.078	0.273
American Athletic	14	0.164	0.092	East Carolina 0.049	0.325
Conference USA	12	0.165	0.115	Louisiana Tech 0.051	0.264
Mountain West	12	0.179	0.117	San Diego State -0.029	0.406
Sun Belt	14	0.182	0.081	Old Dominion 0.005	0.275

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.