Which is the best college football conference in 2019?

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 · 2019

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	41.5%	6.0%	Utah 46.8%	36.1%
Big Ten	14	41.5%	11.9%	Ohio State 56.5%	32.7%
Mountain West	12	41.3%	9.4%	Air Force 54.5%	29.7%
FBS Independents	6	41.2%	9.0%	Army 46.1%	32.9%
Big 12	10	41.0%	7.3%	Oklahoma 50.3%	35.2%
Sun Belt	10	40.8%	12.3%	Louisiana 47.3%	31.3%
SEC	14	40.7%	4.6%	Alabama 52.3%	29.7%
Mid-American	12	40.4%	11.3%	Ohio 50.0%	27.0%
American Athletic	12	40.4%	4.2%	Memphis 47.9%	30.9%
ACC	14	40.4%	7.7%	Wake Forest 48.2%	28.1%
Conference USA	14	39.5%	4.0%	Western Kentucky 42.5%	31.7%

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.