Which College Football Conference is best?

 Stole this one from tigerdroppings today, too hungover to write. Great article on whose conference is best.

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I got tired of the age-old “my conference is better than your conference” arguments, and the Sagarin rankings seem absurd to me, so I decided to compare conference records in OOC games. I don’t look at individual teams, I don’t look at intraconference games, just the sum of the entire conference’s OOC games.

Here’s how they are broken up:

VS BCS OOC: Games played against BCS conference teams from OTHER conferences.

VS NON-BCS 1A: Games against non-BCS conference 1A teams (WAC, MWC, etc., except Notre Dame)

VS ND: Versus Notre Dame, ND is a special case that doesn’t fit neatly into either of the above categories – they’re not in a conference, but they’re a cut above the average Non-BCS 1A, so they only show up in games against BCS top 25. For the record, ACC 0-2, Big Ten 1-3, Pac 10 1-2 vs ND.

VS 1AA: self explanatory. A loss here is embarassing.

VS BCS Top 25: Record vs BCS top 25 as of this week.

Top25 VS Top25: How the top 25 (BCS) in the conference fared against top 25 from other conferences

#teams with BCS OOC win: How many teams in the conference had at least one win against an OOC BCS conference team? This seemed like a good indication of the DEPTH of the conference vis-a-vis other conferences.

VS VS VS VS TOP25 #Teams
BCS NON-BCS 1AA BCS VS W/BCS
OOC OOC TOP25 TOP25 OOCWIN
ACC 4-10 17-6 8-1 1-6 0-1 3
Big East 11-7 15-1 6-0 0-4 0-0 7
Big Ten 6-4 20-3 5-2 2-6 2-0 4
Big 12 3-8 20-6 10-1 0-3 0-2 3
Pac 10 6-4 9-3 5-0 5-7 3-2 5
SEC 9-6 24-1 8-0 3-5 1-1 8

You can slice and dice these numbers a lot of ways. Here’s the things that seem pretty obvious (and objective) to me, ranking the conferences from worst to best:

The ACC sucks. 4-10 against BCS OOC, 17-6 against non-BCS 1A, only 3 of 12 teams with an OOC win against a BCS conference team.

Ditto for the Big 12 – they are clearly sub-par, it’s a toss-up which is worse, ACC or Big 12.

Big East is suprisingly credible. They beat some weak teams from the Big 10 and ACC, but still, their supposedly inferior teams managed quite a few wins (7 of 8 had OOC wins against BCS conf teams). Numbers are slightly inflated by only playing 7 conference games, allowing for 5 OOC games per team. I bump them down below Big 10 primarily due to only 4 games vs non-conf top 25 (and no wins) and none of the top teams played a top 25 OOC team. I think the Big 10 is better at the top, although the Big East may well be better top to bottom. Hard to say that with a straight face, but the numbers don’t lie. The Big Ten has some dreadful teams at the bottom.

Big 10 has a good record OOC at the top, but it is blemished by two losses to 1AA teams and only 4 of 11 teams winning OOC against another BCS conference. Good, but not the best, particularly after the first 4 teams or so.

PAC 10: Good record OOC, the 9-3 record vs non-BCS 1A is a little bit of a concern, but that includes some pretty good teams like Boise State. 5 teams of 10 have OOC BCS conf wins, and they played by far the most OOC top 25 teams (12 vs 8 for the SEC and the Big 10, which both have more teams in conference than PAC 10 does). Even taking out USC they played a tough schedule and had pretty good results.

SEC: Good OOC record vs BCS, excellent record vs non-BCS, and 8 teams (of 12) posted wins against OOC BCS teams. I rate them higher than Big 10 because of the 8 vs 4 teams had OOC wins vs BCS conference teams, and slightly higher than PAC 10 because removing any one team from the SEC results has minimal effect on the overall record, vs removing USC from the PAC 10, which drops the numbers quite a bit, so SEC gets the nod in terms of depth.

Whew.

There’s the FACTs, and then my take on the facts. Feel free to take the facts and draw your own conclusions.