Which is the best college football conference in 2015?

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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CORE offense · 2015

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	6.7	13.1	California 17.3	-3.6
Big 12	10	4.2	14.7	Baylor 18.0	-19.0
SEC	14	3.4	14.6	Arkansas 20.4	-15.6
FBS Independents	3	3.0	21.3	Notre Dame 17.1	-4.3
ACC	14	2.2	7.2	Clemson 18.4	-19.8
Big Ten	14	1.7	12.1	Ohio State 11.0	-12.7
American Athletic	12	1.6	8.8	Navy 14.1	-17.4
Mountain West	12	-3.0	5.9	Air Force 3.3	-17.1
Conference USA	13	-6.0	17.1	Western Kentucky 19.0	-20.3
Sun Belt	11	-6.2	8.6	Georgia Southern 6.0	-17.6
Mid-American	13	-6.2	7.7	Bowling Green 16.8	-21.7

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.