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

Season2026202520242023202220212020201920182017201620152014

Third down conversion · 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
FBS Independents	4	44.6%	10.7%	Army 51.9%	33.1%
Big 12	10	43.5%	5.4%	Texas Tech 52.8%	34.6%
ACC	14	42.8%	9.0%	Clemson 50.2%	31.7%
American Athletic	12	42.3%	9.0%	Navy 55.1%	28.6%
Mountain West	12	41.8%	6.9%	Boise State 47.9%	36.2%
SEC	14	41.8%	2.4%	Alabama 44.2%	35.3%
Mid-American	12	40.7%	9.0%	Western Michigan 54.7%	32.9%
Big Ten	14	40.1%	10.1%	Ohio State 46.0%	28.9%
Pac-12	12	39.6%	6.1%	USC 48.0%	37.3%
Sun Belt	11	38.2%	6.4%	Georgia Southern 45.7%	29.7%
Conference USA	13	38.0%	8.9%	Louisiana Tech 50.3%	33.0%

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.