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

CORE offense · 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	12.8	15.3	Notre Dame 20.4	5.1
Big Ten	18	5.8	16.9	Indiana 18.8	-11.0
SEC	16	5.4	16.7	Vanderbilt 27.6	-2.9
Big 12	16	3.3	10.9	Utah 18.7	-11.8
ACC	17	2.1	12.9	Miami 13.5	-14.2
American Athletic	14	1.1	9.3	North Texas 18.0	-22.9
Mountain West	12	-1.6	7.9	UNLV 10.2	-18.2
Pac-12	2	-3.4	11.9	Washington State 2.5	-9.3
Conference USA	12	-5.6	10.4	Kennesaw State 2.2	-26.0
Sun Belt	14	-5.6	10.7	Texas State 12.0	-13.1
Mid-American	13	-6.8	10.6	Toledo 2.8	-22.2

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.