Which is the best college football conference in 2014?

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 EPA/play · 2014

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	0.189	0.089	Navy 0.267	0.169
Pac-12	12	0.176	0.063	Oregon 0.396	0.107
Big 12	10	0.175	0.176	Baylor 0.321	0.024
SEC	14	0.169	0.151	Georgia 0.313	-0.065
ACC	14	0.153	0.170	Georgia Tech 0.342	-0.110
Big Ten	14	0.139	0.098	Ohio State 0.306	-0.005
Mountain West	12	0.134	0.116	Colorado State 0.317	0.058
Mid-American	13	0.126	0.140	Toledo 0.273	-0.053
Sun Belt	11	0.126	0.127	Georgia Southern 0.361	0.009
Conference USA	13	0.106	0.177	Marshall 0.351	-0.017
American Athletic	11	0.082	0.204	Cincinnati 0.264	-0.043

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.