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

CORE overall · 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
ACC	14	10.8	18.7	Clemson 33.3	-12.7
Big 12	10	6.3	12.4	Oklahoma 24.2	-21.1
Pac-12	12	5.3	15.5	Washington 33.4	-14.9
SEC	14	5.0	14.0	Alabama 44.4	-5.5
Big Ten	14	3.6	17.6	Ohio State 28.9	-20.6
FBS Independents	4	0.635	12.8	Notre Dame 8.3	-19.5
American Athletic	12	-0.345	15.3	South Florida 9.9	-17.1
Mountain West	12	-2.6	19.4	San Diego State 14.9	-23.9
Conference USA	13	-7.0	23.3	Western Kentucky 22.7	-29.9
Mid-American	12	-7.6	14.3	Western Michigan 13.1	-20.2
Sun Belt	11	-14.8	18.5	App State 13.8	-38.1

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.