College Football Morning: Is the Big 12 Better Than the ACC?

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One of the quietest big questions ahead of College Football Playoff ranking season is how the committee will adapt to the new conference power structure. During the four-team playoff era, the CFP committee always treated the Power Five leagues mostly the same. Big Ten West teams tended to get knocked, and SEC teams were deservedly elevated, and Conference USA was deservedly disrespected. For the most part, though, teams’ accomplishments were divided down the middle: The Power Five had one set of rules and the Group of Five had another.

Now, the situation is different. The old dividing line still exists between power conference teams and the Group of Five, but there are no longer five power conferences up top. There are four. And between them, there’s a gap. In our model’s current best guess at the 25 best teams in the country, 15 of the 25 best play in the Big Ten or SEC, including all eight of the top eight.

We aren’t going to dive much deeper today into the gap between the Power Two and the rest of the Power Four. We know the SEC is better than the rest of the conferences, and it’s fair to rank the Big Ten above the Big 12 and ACC as well. How much better is it, and how will the committee view the four? Those are questions for closer to the first CFP rankings, when we’ll examine a few ways the committee could decide to handle the question. For now, we’re more curious about a question whose answer we legitimately don’t know:

Which is the third-best conference in the country?

Part of what’s so hard about answering this question is how conference strength is often viewed. The most popular measure of conference strength is how many teams a league places in the playoff. As an actual measure of conference strength, this is dumb. A league is bigger than its one to eight best teams. As a measure of what matters about conference strength, it makes sense. The thing that makes conferences the most money is making people believe their level of play is tops in the country. The playoff is their proving ground. As the field expands, expect “two-bid league” to become a phrase in football, just like it is in college basketball.

The best actual measure of conference strength is how hard it is to play that conference’s average schedule. Generally, this is measured by the average rating of a conference’s teams. We’ll look at the Big 12 and ACC’s shots at being a two-bid league, but first, we’re going to look at how good all of their teams are.

Here are how Movelor, SP+, and FPI rankings view every Big 12 and ACC team relative to one another. All three of these models are generally a little less accurate than betting markets, with an average error margin less than a point worse per game than the famously accurate Vegas closing spread. None of the three are perfect, and things change, but this is how the three view the leagues, top to bottom, relative to one another:

That’s hard to read, but some themes emerge: All three systems put an ACC team at the top. All three have at least eight Big 12 teams among the leagues’ combined top fourteen despite the ACC having one more team overall.

The leagues don’t have the same number of teams, but if we look at the average rankings between the two, we get the following numbers:

• In Movelor, the average Big 12 team is ranked 1.9 places better than the average ACC team when only ranking the 33 combined teams between the leagues.
• In SP+, the average Big 12 team is ranked 1.7 places better than the average ACC team.
• In FPI, the average Big 12 team is ranked 0.4 places better than the average ACC team.

In short, the Big 12 would win if this was scored like a cross country, track, or swim meet, with points awarded to finishers in various positions. This isn’t a race, though. We have better metrics available:

• By Movelor, the average Big 12 team would be a 1.1-point favorite over the average ACC team on a neutral field.
• By SP+, the average Big 12 team would be a 0.8-point favorite over the average ACC team on a neutral field.
• By FPI, the average Big 12 team would be a 0.2-point underdog against the average ACC team on a neutral field.

Overall? The leagues are really, really close in quality. Close enough that we don’t really know which is better at this moment in time. Maybe one pulls away from the other as the year goes on. Maybe they remain neck and neck. To get back to the playoff appearance question, though:

Our model projects an average of 1.59 Big 12 teams will make the playoff. It projects an average of 1.35 ACC teams will make it. Looking at distributions, the Big 12 is slightly likelier to put multiple teams in the field than to only get one (or to get none, which is possible though unlikely). The ACC is likeliest to only get one.

That’s a very small gap. The SEC and Big Ten are at 4.30 playoff teams and 2.77 playoff teams, respectively (the gap between the sum of these numbers and 12.0 is partly explained by Notre Dame and the remnants of the Pac-12). But at this moment in time, our model—which thinks the Big 12 is a little bit better than the ACC—also has the Big 12 a little likelier to get that coveted second team and become a two-bid league.

We’ll continue to monitor.

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More from us:

• Our Week 2 Recap
• NIT Stu’s Week 2 Vibe Check
• Our model’s latest College Football Playoff Bracketology
• Movelor’s Week 3 picks
• My reflections on Iowa State winning the mental game
• Stuart McGrath’s examination of Notre Dame’s loss to NIU and Notre Dame’s Riley Leonard problem
• NIT Stu’s Texas Longhorn war games

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