Which is the best college football conference in 2017?

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 offense · 2017

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	5.2	8.4	Notre Dame 9.9	-11.7
Big 12	10	4.7	8.7	Oklahoma 33.9	-10.9
SEC	14	4.4	8.8	Georgia 19.3	-9.1
Pac-12	12	2.8	13.4	Arizona 12.1	-5.2
ACC	14	1.2	8.8	Louisville 20.8	-7.2
American Athletic	12	-1.3	12.8	UCF 15.1	-8.1
Big Ten	14	-1.9	9.2	Ohio State 19.9	-10.8
Mountain West	12	-1.9	9.0	Colorado State 6.0	-15.9
Sun Belt	12	-4.2	8.7	UL Monroe 6.8	-16.4
Mid-American	12	-4.7	7.5	Toledo 8.2	-18.7
Conference USA	14	-4.9	9.6	Florida Atlantic 7.6	-26.3

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.