Which is the best college football conference in 2025?

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 · 2025

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	2	46.1%	0.4%	Notre Dame 46.3%	45.9%
Big Ten	18	45.1%	6.1%	Ohio State 52.8%	36.0%
American Athletic	14	43.5%	4.8%	North Texas 52.3%	34.7%
Big 12	16	43.2%	6.0%	Utah 49.3%	33.6%
SEC	16	43.2%	6.2%	Tennessee 50.1%	37.9%
ACC	17	41.9%	4.6%	Georgia Tech 49.1%	36.4%
Pac-12	2	41.5%	0.3%	Oregon State 41.7%	41.4%
Mountain West	12	41.0%	3.7%	Air Force 47.8%	36.9%
Sun Belt	14	40.8%	5.8%	Texas State 46.7%	36.0%
Conference USA	12	40.8%	3.8%	Jacksonville State 43.9%	32.9%
Mid-American	13	39.0%	7.6%	Toledo 44.5%	32.1%

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.