Which is the best college football conference in 2017?

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

Offense EPA/play · 2017

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
FBS Independents	4	0.232	0.082	Army 0.289	0.050
American Athletic	12	0.199	0.111	UCF 0.357	0.104
Big 12	10	0.195	0.110	Oklahoma 0.426	0.007
Pac-12	12	0.185	0.081	Arizona 0.323	0.115
SEC	14	0.174	0.084	Georgia 0.291	0.035
Sun Belt	12	0.150	0.106	App State 0.237	0.029
Mountain West	12	0.147	0.113	Colorado State 0.268	-0.028
Conference USA	14	0.137	0.105	Florida Atlantic 0.309	-0.081
ACC	14	0.129	0.117	Louisville 0.337	0.050
Mid-American	12	0.102	0.122	Ohio 0.274	-0.057
Big Ten	14	0.099	0.056	Penn State 0.285	0.016

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.