Which is the best college football conference in 2024?

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 success rate · 2024

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
Pac-12	2	45.1%	6.5%	Washington State 48.3%	41.8%
SEC	16	44.9%	2.9%	Arkansas 49.6%	38.7%
Big 12	16	44.1%	5.0%	Kansas 48.6%	35.4%
Big Ten	18	44.1%	7.8%	Indiana 51.2%	35.5%
Mountain West	12	43.2%	4.9%	Boise State 47.6%	35.0%
Sun Belt	14	42.8%	3.0%	South Alabama 49.6%	34.6%
ACC	17	41.9%	4.9%	Miami 51.8%	34.8%
FBS Independents	3	41.2%	5.5%	Notre Dame 45.7%	40.2%
American Athletic	14	41.1%	6.9%	Army 50.0%	31.9%
Mid-American	12	40.9%	4.3%	Ohio 46.0%	29.8%
Conference USA	10	38.7%	4.5%	Liberty 48.1%	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.