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

Offense success rate · 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	45.6%	5.1%	California 51.6%	38.3%
Big 12	10	45.3%	6.3%	Baylor 50.8%	33.5%
SEC	14	44.7%	7.2%	Ole Miss 50.7%	32.6%
American Athletic	12	43.4%	6.7%	Navy 49.0%	34.9%
Big Ten	14	43.0%	6.3%	Ohio State 48.6%	35.3%
FBS Independents	3	42.9%	6.4%	Notre Dame 47.5%	41.1%
ACC	14	42.8%	4.3%	North Carolina 50.0%	33.9%
Mountain West	12	42.0%	6.1%	Colorado State 46.9%	34.5%
Sun Belt	11	41.6%	5.6%	App State 46.8%	35.1%
Mid-American	13	41.4%	3.3%	Bowling Green 49.6%	29.2%
Conference USA	13	40.6%	5.1%	Western Kentucky 51.0%	36.1%

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.