Which is the best college football conference in 2019?

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 success rate · 2019

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	6	45.7%	6.6%	Army 48.0%	33.5%
Big 12	10	44.7%	2.1%	Oklahoma 54.1%	36.2%
Pac-12	12	44.4%	5.9%	Washington State 51.0%	39.1%
Mid-American	12	44.1%	6.9%	Ohio 49.1%	30.7%
SEC	14	43.6%	5.9%	LSU 56.1%	35.7%
Big Ten	14	43.5%	8.6%	Ohio State 50.6%	32.2%
Sun Belt	10	43.3%	6.5%	Louisiana 52.0%	35.2%
Mountain West	12	43.1%	5.3%	Air Force 52.8%	39.8%
American Athletic	12	42.7%	5.2%	Navy 48.0%	37.3%
Conference USA	14	41.8%	5.2%	Louisiana Tech 46.0%	35.3%
ACC	14	41.5%	3.1%	Clemson 50.9%	36.0%

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.