Which is the best college football conference in 2022?

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

CORE overall · 2022

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	10.6	18.0	Georgia 39.8	-10.8
Big Ten	14	9.4	21.8	Ohio State 33.7	-9.4
Big 12	10	8.0	13.2	Texas 20.2	-1.7
Pac-12	12	5.3	18.1	Utah 16.5	-33.5
ACC	14	4.2	18.6	Florida State 22.3	-8.2
American Athletic	11	0.410	14.7	Tulane 12.7	-16.6
Sun Belt	14	-2.4	13.3	James Madison 19.1	-18.5
Conference USA	11	-7.5	27.0	UTSA 9.0	-27.3
FBS Independents	7	-11.0	20.2	Notre Dame 6.8	-27.6
Mountain West	12	-11.3	23.2	Boise State 12.8	-26.5
Mid-American	12	-11.8	7.6	Toledo 5.5	-22.1

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.