Which is the best college football conference in 2018?

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 success rate · 2018

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 12	10	46.3%	6.1%	Oklahoma 55.0%	37.8%
SEC	14	45.6%	4.9%	Alabama 54.7%	38.0%
FBS Independents	6	44.3%	3.6%	Army 48.7%	37.8%
Sun Belt	10	44.3%	2.7%	Coastal Carolina 45.6%	36.9%
Big Ten	14	44.3%	7.9%	Wisconsin 51.9%	32.6%
Pac-12	12	43.1%	3.0%	Washington State 49.2%	38.3%
ACC	14	43.0%	6.8%	Clemson 49.4%	33.4%
American Athletic	12	42.8%	4.4%	UCF 47.5%	35.7%
Mountain West	12	42.0%	8.0%	Boise State 48.9%	34.2%
Conference USA	14	41.4%	4.4%	North Texas 44.9%	34.8%
Mid-American	12	40.4%	5.8%	Ohio 51.9%	34.3%

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.