Which is the best college football conference in 2023?

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 · 2023

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	0.227	0.122	LSU 0.482	0.069
Big 12	14	0.220	0.117	Kansas 0.384	0.057
Mountain West	12	0.201	0.101	New Mexico 0.272	0.007
Sun Belt	14	0.191	0.116	South Alabama 0.287	0.029
Pac-12	12	0.179	0.163	Oregon 0.474	0.070
ACC	14	0.176	0.111	North Carolina 0.285	0.050
American Athletic	14	0.166	0.150	UAB 0.281	0.016
Conference USA	9	0.142	0.097	Liberty 0.323	0.067
FBS Independents	4	0.135	0.219	Notre Dame 0.341	0.059
Mid-American	12	0.126	0.122	Toledo 0.276	0.020
Big Ten	14	0.111	0.108	Ohio State 0.296	-0.086

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.