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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Third down conversion · 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
American Athletic	12	43.9%	3.9%	UCF 46.6%	39.9%
Pac-12	12	42.9%	1.4%	Washington 45.7%	36.4%
SEC	14	41.6%	7.8%	Mississippi State 47.2%	31.9%
Conference USA	14	40.8%	6.1%	UAB 46.2%	26.9%
FBS Independents	4	40.1%	18.6%	Army 55.1%	35.3%
ACC	14	39.9%	8.7%	Georgia Tech 47.1%	28.7%
Mid-American	12	39.6%	3.5%	Ohio 43.2%	29.0%
Mountain West	12	39.6%	10.6%	Colorado State 51.1%	31.3%
Sun Belt	12	39.4%	9.0%	Arkansas State 45.4%	30.5%
Big 12	10	39.3%	11.3%	TCU 47.4%	28.8%
Big Ten	14	35.2%	12.8%	Wisconsin 49.2%	31.6%

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.