Which is the best college football conference in 2015?

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 · 2015

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 Ten	14	0.091	0.126	Northwestern -0.029	0.225
SEC	14	0.093	0.103	Alabama -0.011	0.230
Mid-American	13	0.106	0.091	Toledo 0.029	0.352
ACC	14	0.134	0.075	Boston College -0.107	0.189
FBS Independents	3	0.141	0.137	BYU 0.054	0.191
American Athletic	12	0.143	0.147	Temple 0.035	0.314
Conference USA	13	0.152	0.092	Marshall -0.001	0.325
Big 12	10	0.156	0.149	West Virginia 0.055	0.345
Pac-12	12	0.159	0.090	Washington 0.029	0.232
Sun Belt	11	0.168	0.178	App State -0.025	0.332
Mountain West	12	0.168	0.080	San Diego State -0.010	0.284

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.