Which is the best college football conference in 2024?

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 · 2024

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	4.6	6.1	Ole Miss 13.2	-5.0
Big 12	16	3.9	7.0	Kansas 17.1	-12.2
Big Ten	18	1.6	17.2	Ohio State 24.8	-12.6
ACC	17	0.130	14.2	Miami 19.5	-11.3
Pac-12	2	-0.410	9.0	Washington State 4.1	-4.9
Sun Belt	14	-1.8	5.3	Texas State 6.4	-19.9
FBS Independents	3	-2.3	18.8	Notre Dame 12.3	-6.5
Mountain West	12	-2.3	9.6	Boise State 12.1	-15.3
American Athletic	14	-3.0	10.0	Navy 10.8	-18.9
Mid-American	12	-6.4	7.3	Ohio 2.0	-15.8
Conference USA	10	-10.2	13.1	Jacksonville State 4.3	-20.3

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.