Which is the best college football conference in 2020?

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 offense · 2020

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	8.9	16.4	BYU 24.6	-2.8
Pac-12	6	5.8	5.0	Oregon 10.9	-4.2
Mid-American	8	4.7	15.6	Western Michigan 20.6	-13.4
Big 12	10	2.1	17.2	Oklahoma 13.4	-20.4
Sun Belt	10	1.9	8.9	Coastal Carolina 13.2	-16.1
SEC	14	1.5	16.1	Alabama 28.8	-13.7
ACC	14	0.815	9.9	North Carolina 19.3	-21.6
Mountain West	11	-0.460	9.6	Air Force 11.9	-13.4
Big Ten	13	-1.0	8.4	Ohio State 19.5	-14.8
American Athletic	11	-2.5	10.0	UCF 12.4	-13.2
Conference USA	11	-4.8	11.6	North Texas 2.2	-15.7

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.