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

CORE overall · 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
SEC	14	10.8	20.2	Georgia 33.9	-17.1
Pac-12	12	7.1	17.1	Oregon 40.9	-15.4
Big 12	14	6.8	20.8	Oklahoma 28.0	-16.8
ACC	14	4.4	14.7	Louisville 16.5	-9.5
Big Ten	14	0.680	19.8	Ohio State 36.4	-14.5
Sun Belt	14	-1.5	12.8	James Madison 17.1	-22.7
Conference USA	9	-6.6	12.4	Liberty 17.4	-20.9
Mountain West	12	-6.7	16.6	Boise State 7.9	-25.9
American Athletic	14	-10.6	19.1	SMU 13.9	-24.0
Mid-American	12	-14.1	17.1	Toledo 10.7	-33.4
FBS Independents	4	-16.9	47.2	Notre Dame 29.3	-18.3

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.