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

Season2026202520242023202220212020201920182017201620152014

CORE overall · 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	12.6	27.2	BYU 33.3	4.6
Big 12	10	7.9	14.6	Oklahoma 24.9	-25.1
Mid-American	8	5.3	16.5	Buffalo 17.7	-27.8
Pac-12	6	4.0	15.2	Oregon 14.9	-4.2
Sun Belt	10	3.6	23.6	Coastal Carolina 17.2	-30.3
Mountain West	11	3.6	21.6	Air Force 13.6	-26.3
ACC	14	2.4	9.8	Clemson 28.8	-23.3
American Athletic	11	0.310	19.6	Cincinnati 23.4	-26.9
SEC	14	-1.1	21.6	Alabama 37.6	-25.8
Big Ten	13	-3.5	13.4	Ohio State 21.5	-14.3
Conference USA	11	-12.0	9.9	UAB 9.8	-18.1

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.