Which is the best college football conference in 2020?

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 · 2020

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	-8.9	14.0	Notre Dame -10.8	5.0
Big 12	10	-8.2	9.6	West Virginia -11.9	4.8
Sun Belt	10	-3.5	14.3	App State -11.8	14.1
Pac-12	6	-2.7	11.2	Colorado -6.5	12.5
Big Ten	13	-2.0	8.2	Northwestern -13.0	15.4
SEC	14	-2.0	12.9	Georgia -9.8	15.6
Mountain West	11	-1.8	14.0	San Diego State -18.0	13.7
Conference USA	11	-0.330	16.4	UAB -10.3	16.7
Mid-American	8	0.640	11.8	Toledo -7.4	14.5
ACC	14	0.710	7.8	Clemson -11.3	6.3
American Athletic	11	2.9	10.9	Cincinnati -15.6	13.7

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.