Which is the best college football conference in 2018?

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

Third down conversion · 2018

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
Big 12	10	43.8%	7.2%	Oklahoma 50.0%	36.0%
SEC	14	41.7%	4.6%	Alabama 53.1%	30.8%
American Athletic	12	41.4%	8.8%	Cincinnati 50.0%	34.3%
Sun Belt	10	41.4%	4.6%	Louisiana 46.7%	33.3%
ACC	14	41.2%	9.2%	NC State 49.2%	28.9%
FBS Independents	6	40.5%	5.6%	Army 56.9%	36.7%
Big Ten	14	40.2%	5.1%	Michigan 49.2%	32.8%
Pac-12	12	39.1%	6.3%	Washington 46.1%	36.1%
Mountain West	12	38.1%	9.4%	Boise State 53.3%	32.4%
Conference USA	14	37.9%	3.5%	Florida International 47.9%	28.6%
Mid-American	12	37.1%	8.1%	Ohio 49.7%	29.1%

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.