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

CORE offense · 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	8.5	Alabama 29.2	-3.7
Big 12	10	4.9	9.7	Oklahoma 34.4	-8.9
Big Ten	14	2.5	8.6	Ohio State 14.8	-21.5
Pac-12	12	1.1	6.6	Washington State 10.1	-14.1
Sun Belt	10	0.085	3.7	Louisiana 7.8	-13.4
ACC	14	-0.955	7.5	Clemson 16.7	-7.1
FBS Independents	6	-2.4	10.6	Notre Dame 6.7	-15.1
American Athletic	12	-3.3	14.7	UCF 13.3	-12.3
Mountain West	12	-3.5	11.9	Utah State 11.1	-15.4
Mid-American	12	-4.1	16.2	Ohio 11.9	-21.9
Conference USA	14	-7.0	13.5	UAB 4.6	-21.9

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.