Which is the best college football conference in 2021?

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 · 2021

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	45.7%	5.2%	Mississippi State 50.6%	32.8%
Big 12	10	45.3%	2.4%	Oklahoma 48.6%	38.3%
Pac-12	12	45.0%	6.9%	Oregon State 50.4%	35.7%
FBS Independents	7	43.5%	11.3%	BYU 49.5%	30.6%
Mid-American	12	43.0%	3.1%	Kent State 49.7%	36.6%
Big Ten	14	42.8%	8.9%	Ohio State 53.2%	35.3%
ACC	14	42.1%	3.8%	Virginia 50.6%	39.4%
American Athletic	11	42.0%	4.3%	Cincinnati 48.1%	36.1%
Mountain West	12	40.9%	4.1%	Fresno State 47.4%	30.3%
Conference USA	14	40.9%	4.5%	Western Kentucky 52.0%	34.5%
Sun Belt	10	40.3%	8.3%	Coastal Carolina 53.1%	34.5%

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.