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

Season2026202520242023202220212020201920182017201620152014

CORE overall · 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
SEC	14	13.2	22.7	Alabama 35.0	-8.4
Pac-12	12	10.1	11.5	Stanford 19.3	-12.3
FBS Independents	3	7.1	31.2	Notre Dame 20.9	-10.4
Big Ten	14	4.3	9.2	Ohio State 26.0	-15.4
Big 12	10	3.9	17.4	Oklahoma 26.2	-31.6
American Athletic	12	3.7	16.2	Navy 12.7	-26.9
ACC	14	3.1	14.5	Clemson 38.0	-13.8
Mid-American	13	-4.7	13.6	Bowling Green 16.6	-25.6
Mountain West	12	-9.9	19.0	San Diego State 11.2	-26.8
Conference USA	13	-16.4	23.3	Western Kentucky 17.1	-26.6
Sun Belt	11	-17.2	20.6	App State 13.0	-28.5

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.