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

Third down conversion · 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	45.4%	8.4%	Notre Dame 49.6%	41.2%
Big Ten	18	45.3%	7.3%	Indiana 58.3%	34.2%
SEC	16	43.4%	6.8%	Vanderbilt 53.1%	33.6%
American Athletic	14	43.0%	9.1%	Navy 53.5%	34.6%
Sun Belt	14	41.3%	8.3%	James Madison 47.4%	34.0%
Conference USA	12	41.0%	5.6%	Western Kentucky 46.7%	25.0%
ACC	17	40.7%	3.4%	Virginia 50.9%	34.9%
Big 12	16	40.5%	5.0%	Utah 52.9%	31.5%
Mountain West	12	39.9%	10.7%	Air Force 51.6%	33.1%
Pac-12	2	39.8%	2.8%	Washington State 41.2%	38.4%
Mid-American	13	35.0%	8.2%	Ohio 43.8%	29.7%

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.