Which is the best college football conference in 2016?

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

Offense success rate · 2016

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
Big 12	10	46.7%	2.6%	Oklahoma 50.8%	35.7%
FBS Independents	4	45.1%	3.1%	Army 47.9%	39.1%
SEC	14	44.0%	3.0%	Alabama 47.5%	40.0%
ACC	14	43.7%	5.1%	Clemson 50.0%	33.4%
Mountain West	12	43.6%	5.9%	Air Force 47.8%	35.1%
Pac-12	12	43.5%	6.1%	Washington 50.9%	38.1%
American Athletic	12	43.2%	6.7%	Navy 51.6%	36.8%
Sun Belt	11	42.2%	4.6%	App State 45.5%	35.5%
Mid-American	12	42.0%	7.3%	Western Michigan 53.0%	37.5%
Big Ten	14	41.7%	2.8%	Ohio State 48.7%	34.2%
Conference USA	13	41.3%	4.0%	Western Kentucky 53.5%	37.4%

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.