Which is the best college football conference in 2019?

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

CORE overall · 2019

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	8.3	18.4	Oklahoma 27.0	-9.6
Big Ten	14	7.6	26.9	Ohio State 49.6	-18.7
SEC	14	6.6	24.4	LSU 50.8	-18.7
American Athletic	12	4.5	22.7	Memphis 20.1	-31.4
ACC	14	1.1	16.8	Clemson 44.0	-16.5
Pac-12	12	0.685	16.3	Utah 25.6	-10.3
Mountain West	12	-3.6	11.3	Air Force 14.7	-19.3
Sun Belt	10	-5.4	10.4	App State 10.2	-19.6
Conference USA	14	-6.0	17.5	Florida Atlantic 5.7	-30.3
FBS Independents	6	-6.7	23.0	Notre Dame 20.9	-55.8
Mid-American	12	-10.4	9.4	Buffalo 2.9	-39.0

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.