Which is the best college football conference in 2022?

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

CORE defense · 2022

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	-6.8	11.0	Georgia -18.9	8.2
Big Ten	14	-5.6	10.1	Iowa -20.8	5.4
Big 12	10	-4.7	8.3	Iowa State -12.7	6.9
ACC	14	-3.9	10.6	Pittsburgh -15.0	9.5
Sun Belt	14	1.3	14.9	James Madison -16.8	12.9
Mountain West	12	2.6	8.4	Boise State -6.1	17.1
Pac-12	12	2.8	8.0	Oregon State -11.6	14.8
American Athletic	11	3.1	8.3	Cincinnati -7.7	19.7
Conference USA	11	4.8	12.6	Middle Tennessee -2.6	19.4
Mid-American	12	5.5	4.9	Toledo -6.3	14.7
FBS Independents	7	6.2	11.9	Notre Dame -4.9	9.3

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.