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

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CORE defense · 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
SEC	14	-7.6	13.9	Mississippi State -20.5	5.4
Big Ten	14	-4.2	11.5	Michigan State -15.6	17.9
ACC	14	-2.4	13.8	Clemson -23.5	11.1
Mountain West	12	-0.670	18.3	Utah State -15.7	14.5
Pac-12	12	0.885	7.1	California -14.4	23.9
American Athletic	12	1.5	8.6	Cincinnati -13.1	36.0
Conference USA	14	1.6	12.1	Southern Miss -10.3	17.4
Big 12	10	1.7	7.4	TCU -10.6	6.9
Sun Belt	10	2.5	17.6	App State -15.7	19.9
FBS Independents	6	2.7	12.0	Notre Dame -10.3	15.8
Mid-American	12	5.3	10.7	Northern Illinois -8.2	14.3

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.