Which is the best college football conference in 2022?

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

Third down conversion · 2022

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	45.5%	13.4%	Washington 60.1%	31.9%
Conference USA	11	43.4%	6.3%	UTSA 48.1%	33.3%
SEC	14	42.0%	7.9%	Georgia 51.7%	36.4%
American Athletic	11	41.1%	7.3%	SMU 48.4%	36.0%
FBS Independents	7	40.8%	8.5%	Notre Dame 48.0%	32.8%
Big 12	10	40.6%	3.6%	Kansas 53.3%	38.0%
Big Ten	14	40.2%	6.2%	Minnesota 52.8%	29.4%
ACC	14	39.6%	10.7%	Florida State 53.0%	31.8%
Mid-American	12	39.4%	7.4%	Eastern Michigan 47.1%	32.3%
Sun Belt	14	38.9%	8.3%	Georgia Southern 49.5%	29.9%
Mountain West	12	37.5%	7.6%	Air Force 48.8%	22.5%

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.