Which is the best college football conference in 2020?

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 · 2020

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	4	49.1%	0.7%	Notre Dame 49.7%	45.5%
Conference USA	11	44.2%	5.0%	North Texas 48.3%	32.5%
Pac-12	6	44.0%	4.8%	Stanford 50.0%	39.8%
Mid-American	8	43.6%	11.9%	Ball State 49.1%	27.9%
Sun Belt	10	42.6%	7.8%	Coastal Carolina 55.1%	27.9%
SEC	14	42.5%	15.6%	Alabama 61.3%	31.5%
American Athletic	11	42.3%	11.1%	UCF 50.6%	32.5%
ACC	14	42.3%	6.8%	North Carolina 48.2%	27.3%
Mountain West	11	41.8%	5.4%	Air Force 48.5%	31.0%
Big Ten	13	39.0%	5.0%	Ohio State 50.9%	33.6%
Big 12	10	38.0%	7.8%	Iowa State 45.9%	25.7%

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.