Which is the best college football conference in 2020?

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 · 2020

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
FBS Independents	4	47.4%	7.0%	BYU 52.5%	42.3%
Mid-American	8	45.9%	6.5%	Western Michigan 51.4%	33.7%
Pac-12	6	45.6%	4.5%	Oregon 49.6%	38.9%
Big Ten	13	43.8%	6.1%	Ohio State 50.9%	31.7%
SEC	14	43.7%	5.7%	Alabama 56.1%	38.5%
Sun Belt	10	42.1%	6.1%	Coastal Carolina 50.2%	35.6%
American Athletic	11	41.9%	7.1%	UCF 47.3%	34.9%
ACC	14	41.6%	3.5%	North Carolina 50.5%	31.9%
Big 12	10	40.9%	6.4%	Oklahoma 50.5%	29.9%
Conference USA	11	40.4%	2.9%	North Texas 46.6%	37.5%
Mountain West	11	39.9%	7.2%	Air Force 52.2%	33.7%

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.