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

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Offense success rate · 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
Pac-12	12	45.3%	3.4%	Washington 48.6%	40.6%
SEC	14	43.9%	5.5%	Alabama 48.4%	38.5%
Big 12	10	43.1%	6.1%	Oklahoma 53.3%	32.7%
ACC	14	42.9%	4.1%	Louisville 49.9%	38.6%
Mountain West	12	42.8%	6.1%	Colorado State 49.1%	37.1%
American Athletic	12	42.8%	4.9%	UCF 49.3%	40.0%
Conference USA	14	42.1%	6.4%	North Texas 47.4%	32.9%
FBS Independents	4	41.9%	10.6%	Army 51.7%	38.7%
Sun Belt	12	41.5%	4.8%	Arkansas State 46.1%	36.8%
Mid-American	12	40.8%	5.1%	Ohio 48.5%	32.7%
Big Ten	14	40.1%	5.7%	Ohio State 52.1%	36.1%

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.