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

Defense EPA/play allowed · 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
SEC	14	0.089	0.117	Ole Miss -0.047	0.199
ACC	14	0.091	0.090	Clemson -0.052	0.268
Big Ten	14	0.095	0.055	Penn State -0.044	0.247
American Athletic	11	0.106	0.137	Temple -0.017	0.279
Big 12	10	0.110	0.111	TCU -0.014	0.279
Pac-12	12	0.119	0.138	Stanford 0.013	0.257
Mountain West	12	0.160	0.107	Utah State 0.026	0.279
Mid-American	13	0.162	0.032	Western Michigan 0.073	0.296
Sun Belt	11	0.163	0.155	App State 0.095	0.337
Conference USA	13	0.173	0.094	Marshall 0.029	0.298
FBS Independents	4	0.178	0.074	BYU 0.086	0.246

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.