Which is the best college football conference in 2016?

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

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CORE offense · 2016

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	6.4	11.1	Alabama 12.7	-9.3
Big 12	10	4.2	10.5	Oklahoma 24.0	-18.4
ACC	14	3.7	13.7	Louisville 19.8	-14.6
Pac-12	12	2.5	10.8	Washington 16.0	-8.0
American Athletic	12	-0.240	15.8	South Florida 14.5	-18.6
FBS Independents	4	-0.300	7.9	Notre Dame 7.3	-7.0
Big Ten	14	-0.855	9.6	Ohio State 6.9	-13.7
Mountain West	12	-1.1	10.0	Boise State 9.5	-16.6
Mid-American	12	-3.8	6.8	Western Michigan 14.1	-12.0
Conference USA	13	-4.1	12.6	Western Kentucky 16.8	-14.7
Sun Belt	11	-7.8	7.0	App State 4.9	-19.9

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.