Which is the best college football conference in 2023?

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

Offense success rate · 2023

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	14	44.0%	6.8%	Oklahoma 49.3%	35.5%
Pac-12	12	43.8%	9.7%	Oregon 56.3%	36.9%
SEC	14	43.4%	6.1%	LSU 55.6%	35.8%
Mountain West	12	42.5%	3.6%	Boise State 46.7%	35.7%
American Athletic	14	41.9%	5.3%	UAB 47.7%	34.2%
Sun Belt	14	41.8%	7.4%	Texas State 47.9%	34.9%
ACC	14	41.2%	4.3%	Louisville 48.5%	37.0%
Big Ten	14	41.2%	6.4%	Michigan 47.4%	32.2%
FBS Independents	4	40.9%	8.8%	Notre Dame 49.5%	38.8%
Conference USA	9	40.6%	1.9%	Liberty 51.5%	35.8%
Mid-American	12	39.0%	5.6%	Toledo 45.7%	33.8%

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.