Which is the best college football conference in 2021?

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 · 2021

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	45.4%	9.3%	Oregon 52.0%	34.9%
Big 12	10	44.7%	5.9%	TCU 48.2%	37.8%
FBS Independents	7	43.0%	13.0%	Army 46.9%	23.9%
Conference USA	14	42.2%	9.0%	Western Kentucky 49.1%	33.3%
Mountain West	12	42.1%	7.6%	Air Force 46.0%	25.6%
ACC	14	41.9%	5.4%	Wake Forest 52.9%	34.2%
SEC	14	41.8%	7.5%	Alabama 53.6%	32.8%
Mid-American	12	40.3%	6.3%	Western Michigan 48.3%	35.0%
Big Ten	14	40.1%	7.4%	Ohio State 52.9%	33.5%
American Athletic	11	39.1%	5.1%	SMU 46.0%	28.8%
Sun Belt	10	36.9%	5.8%	Coastal Carolina 56.0%	33.7%

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.