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

Third down conversion · 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
Sun Belt	14	43.3%	8.6%	Georgia Southern 48.3%	32.9%
Pac-12	12	42.8%	6.3%	Oregon 51.3%	34.2%
Mountain West	12	41.8%	9.2%	UNLV 51.5%	34.2%
Big 12	14	41.2%	9.8%	UCF 51.8%	30.9%
Big Ten	14	40.7%	6.4%	Wisconsin 46.1%	30.5%
American Athletic	14	40.6%	7.2%	UTSA 48.9%	26.6%
ACC	14	40.5%	5.0%	North Carolina 48.4%	32.0%
SEC	14	40.1%	8.3%	Georgia 56.7%	30.3%
Conference USA	9	39.6%	8.3%	Liberty 51.0%	29.6%
FBS Independents	4	39.3%	7.6%	Notre Dame 45.9%	36.6%
Mid-American	12	36.6%	7.9%	Ohio 46.9%	30.6%

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.