Which is the best college football conference in 2014?

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 success rate · 2014

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	45.3%	5.8%	Navy 51.0%	44.0%
SEC	14	44.1%	8.6%	Mississippi State 51.0%	37.5%
Sun Belt	11	43.7%	7.0%	Georgia Southern 51.2%	38.2%
Big 12	10	43.6%	8.8%	Baylor 50.1%	34.0%
Pac-12	12	43.6%	3.7%	Oregon 51.7%	41.0%
ACC	14	43.1%	8.6%	Georgia Tech 53.5%	31.4%
Big Ten	14	42.6%	5.5%	Ohio State 51.8%	38.5%
American Athletic	11	41.5%	8.6%	East Carolina 49.4%	32.8%
Mid-American	13	41.4%	5.6%	Toledo 50.4%	34.1%
Conference USA	13	41.2%	6.3%	Western Kentucky 49.0%	34.9%
Mountain West	12	40.5%	7.0%	Boise State 46.0%	35.9%

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.