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

CORE overall · 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
ACC	14	11.0	13.0	Clemson 30.3	-6.8
Big 12	10	9.6	19.9	Oklahoma 36.4	-19.0
SEC	14	7.3	18.6	Georgia 39.6	-6.6
Pac-12	12	6.0	15.4	Washington 21.4	-18.0
Big Ten	14	5.9	27.0	Ohio State 36.2	-17.4
American Athletic	12	-2.8	22.7	UCF 23.9	-27.2
FBS Independents	4	-3.1	25.3	Notre Dame 20.8	-11.4
Conference USA	14	-5.5	19.7	Florida Atlantic 6.5	-35.1
Mid-American	12	-5.8	17.1	Ohio 7.6	-29.1
Mountain West	12	-10.6	23.4	Boise State 8.9	-29.8
Sun Belt	12	-13.8	19.9	Troy 8.2	-20.7

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.