Which is the best college football conference in 2015?

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 · 2015

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	-9.5	5.3	Alabama -25.6	6.8
Big Ten	14	-5.8	13.0	Ohio State -15.0	14.0
FBS Independents	3	-3.8	10.2	BYU -4.1	6.1
Big 12	10	-2.7	13.6	Oklahoma -13.7	15.9
ACC	14	-1.6	5.7	Boston College -21.6	7.3
Pac-12	12	-1.3	7.9	Washington -11.5	10.1
American Athletic	12	0.510	12.3	Temple -10.2	15.2
Mid-American	13	0.640	6.5	Toledo -9.3	19.4
Conference USA	13	4.6	9.7	Marshall -7.8	18.1
Sun Belt	11	6.2	17.5	App State -7.3	20.9
Mountain West	12	8.1	9.6	San Diego State -10.3	11.4

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.