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

Offense success rate · 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	47.7%	10.6%	UCLA 53.8%	37.1%
ACC	14	44.1%	6.4%	Florida State 47.9%	35.6%
American Athletic	11	43.9%	4.6%	UCF 47.9%	36.8%
Big 12	10	43.7%	4.1%	Texas 47.6%	38.5%
SEC	14	43.5%	7.9%	Georgia 53.0%	38.6%
Big Ten	14	42.0%	6.2%	Ohio State 50.7%	35.0%
Conference USA	11	41.7%	5.1%	UTSA 47.4%	36.7%
FBS Independents	7	41.2%	8.6%	Notre Dame 46.7%	31.8%
Mid-American	12	40.8%	4.9%	Eastern Michigan 45.9%	33.9%
Mountain West	12	39.8%	8.0%	Air Force 49.3%	31.3%
Sun Belt	14	39.8%	5.9%	App State 46.0%	35.2%

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.