Which is the best college football conference in 2026?

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 defense · 2026

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	1	-10.8	0.000	Notre Dame -10.8	-10.8
SEC	10	-5.5	4.9	Alabama -16.4	4.0
Big Ten	12	-4.6	10.9	Ohio State -9.1	9.7
Mountain West	5	-2.8	6.2	San José State -5.9	5.2
Conference USA	6	-1.8	8.1	Florida International -8.0	16.0
Big 12	6	-0.070	4.5	Baylor -5.3	6.4
ACC	12	0.085	6.8	Duke -5.3	7.6
American Athletic	9	1.4	3.0	Tulsa -2.3	7.9
Mid-American	4	2.3	9.3	Buffalo 1.3	10.9
Sun Belt	6	2.9	5.3	Georgia Southern -3.8	7.4
Pac-12	5	3.3	0.850	Washington State -2.5	3.5

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.