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

CORE overall · 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	14.1	12.3	Georgia 45.0	-23.3
Big Ten	14	9.7	20.1	Ohio State 34.8	-18.9
Big 12	10	9.5	8.8	Oklahoma State 23.8	-23.1
ACC	14	2.1	13.9	NC State 16.1	-27.9
American Athletic	11	1.9	11.8	Cincinnati 24.7	-27.9
Mountain West	12	1.7	10.7	Boise State 10.9	-25.2
FBS Independents	7	-0.480	46.4	Notre Dame 15.9	-39.2
Pac-12	12	-1.2	18.8	Utah 20.8	-17.1
Conference USA	14	-6.2	23.0	UAB 13.3	-32.6
Sun Belt	10	-8.7	23.8	App State 15.1	-27.0
Mid-American	12	-14.3	17.2	Toledo 4.5	-33.1

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.