Which is the best college football conference in 2024?

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 overall · 2024

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	16	13.9	9.5	Ole Miss 29.1	-9.1
Big 12	16	8.1	12.7	Kansas State 17.6	-8.2
Big Ten	18	7.4	20.6	Ohio State 43.5	-18.9
ACC	17	1.7	14.2	Miami 22.9	-13.2
FBS Independents	3	-0.890	47.3	Notre Dame 31.5	-15.7
American Athletic	14	-4.5	12.6	Navy 14.1	-29.4
Sun Belt	14	-7.7	17.3	South Alabama 5.8	-35.7
Mountain West	12	-7.7	14.0	Boise State 16.3	-23.9
Pac-12	2	-10.0	14.5	Washington State -2.8	-17.3
Conference USA	10	-10.8	20.1	Liberty 2.5	-27.6
Mid-American	12	-14.4	22.9	Northern Illinois 4.6	-36.6

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.