Best College Football Conferences

Warning: ****Nerd Alert****

I need to warn anyone who is not interested in the minutia of college football or sports statistics might want to either skip this post or just look at the graphs, they will pretty much tell the whole story. Furthermore this post is littered with parenthetical thoughts. (I just like inserting ideas/explanations, so I hope that isn't a problem for anyone.) Finally, I would appreciate any comments from my fellow nerds out there.

Here. We. Go....

I recently found this article on ESPN.com and found it intriguing.

The subject matter is basically that despite an abysmal record in BCS bowls the ACC and Big East are considered "solid" by the BCS committee and the world of College Football-at-large. The writer of the article throws around various statistics that prove that the ACC and Big East are actually part of the top 6 College Football Conferences.

Since I have been working in a lab this summer and between experiments there is a significant amount of down time, I decided today that I would look into his claims and see if the ACC and Big East are actually the best conferences.

Let's Start with What was in his article.

Here is my graphical version of one of the tables in the article:

Click Here for a Large Version of this Image

As you can see, the lower the bar the better, (Closer to a number one ranking), and it appears that the MWC and WAC are the worst two conferences of the 8 I looked at. (The others are not worth mentioning.) One thing that caught my attention was the fact this article used the final BCS rankings which are posted before the bowl games. This was actually the impetus for my looking into this, because I feel that since the final Coaches' and AP Polls determine the national champion, they really should be taken into account when determining strength of conferences.

I decided the only way to determine the best conferences was to look at the best ranked teams (the TOP 25; both Coaches' and AP), then look at the overall composition of the AP and Coaches' TOP 25 (This way I can look at the best of the rest), and finally and perhaps less objective I wanted to look at the worst teams so I went to ESPN's Bottom 10.

I have compiled my data in Excel (My favorite computer program besides a web browser) and provided it in graphical form:

Best Ranked Teams:

Click Here for a Large Version of this Image

An interesting discovery here is that on average the ACC's best team is worse than the MWC's best team over the span I looked at.

Click Here for a Large Version of this Image

Now when you look at this graph you will see that both the WAC's (Due almost exclusively to Boise State) and more importantly the MWC's best teams are on an upward trend and getting better comparatively to the other conferences. In fact the MWC's best team has been better than the Big East's and the ACC's best teamsthe last two years and better than the ACC's best team in two more other years.

The evidence against the ACC and Big East continues to mount...

The Top 25:

Click Here for a Large Version of this Image

This is pretty straight forward. This is a graphical representation of the percentage that each conference contributes to the Top 25. I did this and then I got to thinking most of the BCS conferences (at least for the present) have 11 or more members. This would also help weed out conferences that are "top heavy", with one team that dominates the conference (a la Bosie State in the WAC). So I decided to take into account the percentage of the conference that was in the Top 25 and the results were surprising.

Click Here for a Large Version of this Image

This shows (From 2003 to 2009) the average percentage of the conference that was in the Top 25. As you can see the ACC does quite well, but the Big East and the WAC are inferior to the MWC. My next thought when I saw the results was that perhaps strong conferences beat each other up, but the I noticed that traditionally strong conferences with a good deal of parity like the SEC have the hight percentage of the conference in the top 25.

Click Here for a Large Version of this Image

This a look over time of the trends of these various conferences. One thing to notice is the upward trend of the MWC. When one looks at last year, 2009, you can see that the MWC tied for second (with the SEC) in the highest percentage of the conference in the Top 25! This, to me, is among the strongest evidence that the MWC is a strong conference with the ability to keep teams in the top 25 proportionally to the "Major Conferences". (Please forgive the typo.)

Click Here for a Large Version of this Image

This last one was more for fun, but I did it with a purpose. Conferences are not only as good as their best teams but they are as bad as their worst teams. So I looked at ESPN's Bottom Ten over the past few years, because I wanted to see the teams that are thought of as the "worst" teams in College football and how they stack up to each other. I was surprised by the results. The SEC seems to be the strongest conference, and the Pac-10, ACC and WAC have some of the worst teams consistently. Another surprise was that the Big East might not of had some of the strongest but they didn't have the worst teams either.

Conclusion:

I don't know if there is enough evidence to say that the ACC or the Big East are not deserving of their BCS status. I do feel, however that there is strong evidence that the MWC is deserving of a spot at the "big kids table". They have proven over the last 7 years that they are consistently among the best conferences in college football and in my opinion the BCS should expand to include them and I feel like there is good data to back this up.

Thanks for reading and if you would like my data, click here for a link to my spreadsheet.

(Believe it or not it took a ton of time compiling.)