Which is the best college football conference in 2017?

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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Average starting field position · 2017

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
Sun Belt	12	32.5	2.6	Arkansas State 37.3	26.5
American Athletic	12	32.2	4.6	UCF 35.5	26.8
ACC	14	32.1	1.5	Virginia Tech 36.1	27.2
Mid-American	12	32.1	3.3	Western Michigan 39.4	29.0
SEC	14	31.9	2.3	Alabama 35.1	28.5
FBS Independents	4	31.4	2.5	Massachusetts 33.2	30.3
Mountain West	12	31.4	2.5	Boise State 34.7	26.8
Big Ten	14	31.3	1.9	Penn State 37.4	29.8
Pac-12	12	31.3	3.2	Washington 35.4	28.2
Big 12	10	30.8	3.3	Kansas State 37.6	27.9
Conference USA	14	30.6	2.7	Florida Atlantic 33.8	27.9

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.