SEC Supremacy in College Football? Don’t Be So Sure

The Oregon Ducks and the Oregon State Beavers squared off for supremacy in one of the toughest conferences in the nation this year.

We all got what we were waiting for. SEC heavyweights Alabama and Florida mixed it up in Atlanta, marking the first time the nation’s #1 and #2 teams faced each other in a conference championship. Based on the fact that neither of these two teams were ranked lower than #4 during the entire season and that SEC teams have won the last three national championships, it seems like a lock to say that the SEC was the strongest conference in the nation this year.

Right?

The fact that the question is being asked at all means there’s some uncertainty. Figuring out which conference is the strongest is no simple task. Teams generally schedule just four non-conference games each season, and those games rarely feature power teams against each other.

It gets worse when you remember that only the top 25 teams are ranked. That helps to sort things out at the top, but it does little for determining the strength of the remaining 84 teams in the country.

So where do we begin? It seems that the best way to tell which conference is the strongest, top to bottom, would be looking at their record against non-conference teams. Logically, the conference that wins the most games, on average, against other conferences should be the strongest.

No contest there. The SEC posted a staggering 42-6 record against non-conference foes this year. The Big East and Big Ten round out the top three, boasting records of 32-8 and 35-13, respectively.

Of course, it’s not as simple as all that. Winning 88% of your non-conference games is impressive, certainly, but the quality of the competition certainly has to be taken into account. SEC non-conference opponents combined this year to win just 38% of their games, good for an average record of 4-8.

.380 is good for the lowest non-conference win percentage, meaning weakest out-of-conference schedule, of any of the 11 FBS conferences, and is a full game worse than the average strength of schedule for a non-conference slate (.454).

This isn’t to say that the other conferences are much better. Not surprisingly, the other two conferences with the best non-conference records had some of the worst strength of schedule ratings, with the Big East at #10 and the Big 12 at #8 (out of 11).

But does that tell us the full story? Not quite. Sometimes wins and losses can be misleading.

Take Connecticut, for instance. On the surface, their 7-5 record suggests a somewhat mediocre team. But if you look a bit deeper, you find that three of their losses came to ranked teams (#19 UNC, #23 West Virginia, and #5 Cincinnati) by a total of eight points, and that they lost to a fourth (Pittsburgh) that was on the verge of being ranked by just three points.

That’s the mark of a good team that just suffered some heartbreaking losses.

That’s why I like to look at things through the lens of scoring margin. Teams with a high scoring margin win by more points, on average, than those with a lower scoring margin. It’s not foolproof, certainly, since there’s still strength of schedule to be considered, but it does a good job of weeding out weaker teams.

Looking at the scoring margin of non-conference slates reveals more than we initially saw. The SEC’s opponents combined to win just 38% of their games, but they were also outscored, on average, by 8.5 points. Five teams put up a scoring margin in that range this year: Louisiana-Lafayette, Louisville, Colorado State, Ball State, and North Texas.

They averaged just over three wins each this season.

That’s not to say that the SEC is collectively picking on weaker teams to inflate their win totals, but looking at the teams above, it’s certainly not outside the realm of imagination to see non-conference slates like that.

Meanwhile, on the high end of the strength of schedule ladder, we find the Sun Belt (.558) and Conference USA (.509). Of course, they tend to have difficult non-conference schedules because power conferences look to them to provide easy victories. Florida International, a Sun Belt school, found themselves playing both Florida and Alabama this year.

The third-ranked conference, however, is far from a cream puff. The Pac-10′s average non-conference opponent checks in at exactly 6-6, and they posted a record of 22-9 against said competition. Not too shabby. Teams with a similar scoring margin to their non-conference foes this year include Mississippi State, Purdue, and Minnesota.

Certainly a far cry from Louisiana-Lafayette and North Texas.

It’s hard to argue with the concentration of power at the top of the SEC, with Florida, Alabama, and LSU leading the way. But power at the top isn’t everything. No one mistakes the Mountain West, with their big three of TCU, BYU, and Utah, for the SEC.

The argument you’re most likely to hear from the SEC is that since their conference is so strong, they don’t need to schedule tough non-conference games. A quick look at the standings pokes some holes in that theory. The big three lead the way with 13, 12, and 9 wins, but the rest of the conference is a muddle after that. Other than Florida, Alabama, and LSU, no team in the SEC won more than half of their games in conference play.

Compare that to the Pac-10, which features a five-way tie for second place in the conference at 8-4.

Apologists may argue that the SEC teams beat up on each other to produce those murky standings, but it seems clear the same thing happened in the Pac-10, only their non-conference wins came against stronger competition.

The only way to know for certain which conference is stronger would be to have every team from each conference face each other. If that were to happen, Florida and Alabama would certainly be expected to do very well. But I’m not too sure that teams like Oregon, Oregon State, Stanford, and Arizona wouldn’t be able to hold their own.

After all, UCLA, which finished eighth in the Pac-10, was able to handle Tennessee, which finished fourth in the SEC.

I won’t presume to say that the Pac-10 is stronger than the SEC purely on the basis of a few statistics. But it’s safe to say that the perception of SEC dominance isn’t quite as clear as it might seem.