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

CORE defense · 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
SEC	14	-7.8	14.0	Auburn -21.4	9.6
Big Ten	14	-7.2	15.2	Ohio State -19.9	5.9
American Athletic	12	-3.0	11.8	Cincinnati -11.6	18.0
Big 12	10	-2.4	4.3	Baylor -14.0	7.5
ACC	14	1.0	10.3	Clemson -27.6	9.9
Pac-12	12	1.6	13.4	Oregon -15.9	8.8
Mountain West	12	2.6	13.1	San Diego State -11.3	11.0
Conference USA	14	3.6	14.1	Western Kentucky -8.2	16.6
FBS Independents	6	3.9	13.7	Notre Dame -13.5	34.2
Sun Belt	10	4.4	8.6	App State -8.7	12.2
Mid-American	12	8.1	8.9	Buffalo -5.0	18.6

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.