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

Third down conversion · 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
Big Ten	18	44.8%	5.8%	Oregon 50.9%	32.9%
SEC	16	44.2%	5.7%	LSU 50.5%	35.8%
Pac-12	2	43.3%	1.1%	Washington State 43.9%	42.8%
Big 12	16	43.2%	2.9%	Kansas 53.2%	30.1%
Sun Belt	14	41.5%	5.8%	Troy 52.9%	26.4%
FBS Independents	3	40.9%	3.2%	Notre Dame 42.4%	39.2%
ACC	17	40.7%	6.8%	Miami 57.4%	30.3%
Mountain West	12	40.6%	6.2%	Boise State 50.8%	36.0%
Conference USA	10	39.5%	4.5%	Western Kentucky 44.0%	32.6%
American Athletic	14	39.4%	8.5%	Tulane 50.9%	31.8%
Mid-American	12	36.8%	7.7%	Ohio 47.3%	21.8%

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.