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

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CORE defense · 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
ACC	14	-6.4	12.4	Clemson -18.7	5.7
Big Ten	14	-5.3	11.2	Ohio State -22.0	12.5
SEC	14	-3.1	10.2	Alabama -31.7	5.5
Pac-12	12	-2.1	13.6	Washington -17.4	13.6
Big 12	10	-1.6	7.3	TCU -7.2	13.9
American Athletic	12	0.180	11.1	UCF -11.9	11.5
FBS Independents	4	1.4	13.6	BYU -5.7	12.6
Sun Belt	11	4.0	16.9	App State -9.0	18.2
Mid-American	12	4.4	6.6	Ohio -5.4	9.3
Mountain West	12	5.7	9.3	San Diego State -12.8	13.2
Conference USA	13	8.0	12.4	Western Kentucky -5.9	19.1

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.