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

Season2026202520242023202220212020201920182017201620152014

Offense EPA/play · 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
Big 12	10	0.215	0.165	Baylor 0.374	-0.017
Pac-12	12	0.197	0.121	Stanford 0.293	0.062
FBS Independents	3	0.192	0.118	Notre Dame 0.269	0.151
American Athletic	12	0.187	0.131	Navy 0.324	-0.046
SEC	14	0.170	0.143	Arkansas 0.340	-0.045
Mountain West	12	0.166	0.078	Air Force 0.238	-0.018
ACC	14	0.156	0.097	North Carolina 0.338	0.005
Sun Belt	11	0.132	0.056	App State 0.242	0.050
Mid-American	13	0.131	0.078	Bowling Green 0.355	-0.100
Big Ten	14	0.131	0.124	Ohio State 0.226	0.016
Conference USA	13	0.111	0.149	Western Kentucky 0.326	-0.039

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.