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

Defense EPA/play allowed · 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	0.097	0.138	Mississippi State -0.051	0.230
Big Ten	14	0.108	0.126	Michigan -0.007	0.331
Conference USA	14	0.130	0.088	UAB -0.013	0.317
Mountain West	12	0.134	0.147	Utah State 0.005	0.280
ACC	14	0.143	0.117	Clemson -0.059	0.353
Pac-12	12	0.146	0.091	California 0.011	0.396
American Athletic	12	0.163	0.112	Cincinnati 0.004	0.505
Mid-American	12	0.168	0.142	Northern Illinois 0.060	0.303
FBS Independents	6	0.172	0.104	Notre Dame 0.056	0.249
Big 12	10	0.176	0.043	TCU 0.078	0.273
Sun Belt	10	0.190	0.175	App State -0.019	0.369

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.