Which is the best college football conference in 2015?

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 · 2015

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	3	43.4%	6.0%	Army 46.8%	40.8%
American Athletic	12	43.0%	13.0%	Cincinnati 52.9%	30.0%
Big 12	10	42.5%	5.2%	Texas Tech 52.5%	36.1%
Pac-12	12	41.2%	8.1%	Stanford 50.3%	32.5%
Conference USA	13	40.7%	8.6%	Rice 50.6%	33.9%
Big Ten	14	40.6%	6.4%	Michigan State 49.0%	27.7%
ACC	14	39.5%	8.2%	North Carolina 50.9%	27.8%
SEC	14	39.3%	6.0%	Arkansas 47.8%	30.7%
Mid-American	13	39.2%	6.7%	Bowling Green 51.3%	24.3%
Mountain West	12	38.9%	7.7%	San José State 48.9%	30.4%
Sun Belt	11	37.6%	6.7%	Georgia State 45.0%	31.2%

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.