2009 College Football Conference Ratings and Rankings

With the regular season complete, we can now take a look at how the conferences compare and see if it matches perceptions.

First, lets take a look at the average/high/low rating across all of the conferences using my computer ratings as a reference.

Rank	Conference	Average	High	Low
Rank	Conference	Average	High	Low
1	SEC	78.134	92.067	63.234
2	Pac-10	73.561	82.424	54.839
3	Big-12	73.170	86.519	63.500
4	ACC	72.969	82.604	63.626
5	Big-East	72.193	81.371	62.401
6	Big-Televen	69.403	78.391	62.090
7	Mountain-West	66.870	85.377	52.423
8	Independent	65.699	71.911	55.203
9	WAC	64.261	81.817	51.060
10	C-USA	63.107	72.384	52.853
11	MAC	60.047	72.570	45.613
12	Sun-Belt	56.712	68.263	45.520

So the SEC was far and away the best conference based on average rating with a 4.5 point gap to the #2 Pac-10.  I think most would be surprised the Pac-10 is #2 ahead of the Big-12 especially given the Big-12 is ahead in both the high and low ratings.  But the Pac-10 has strength in the middle and only has the single outlier in WSU at the bottom.  It is also interesting that the 6 BCS conference are well ahead of the rest, although the Big-Televen is hovering in no mans land well behind the top-5 conferences.

Another way of looking at it is to just rank each conference in all their non-conference games.  Doing that results in:

Rank	Team	Rating	Record	Schedule
Rank	Team	Rating	Record	Schedule
1	SEC	75.166	42-6	60.517
2	Big-12	72.706	35-13	61.851
3	Big-East	72.083	32-8	62.803
4	ACC	70.792	30-18	63.330
5	Pac-10	70.671	21-9	65.282
6	Big-Televen	69.545	32-12	61.706
7	Mountain-West	67.907	21-15	65.077
8	Independent	66.698	18-15	66.227
9	WAC	65.112	19-20	65.990
10	MAC	61.739	16-36	66.424
11	C-USA	61.709	19-29	66.591
12	Sun-Belt	58.915	8-28	69.183
13	I-AA	53.491	5-89	71.532

This also has the SEC with a clear lead, but this shows us several very interesting observations.

The SEC has a clear gap to #2 Big-12 and does so with a very good 42-6 record out of conference, but does it again the weakest opposition of any conference.  This supports the perception that the SEC schedules a bunch of cream-puffs out of conference.

The second weakest schedule goes to the Big-Televen just edging out the Big-12.  So these conferences also do a good job of scheduling patsies.  The strongest schedule amongst the BCS conferences by a wide margin goes to the Pac-10, so they would seem to schedule the fewest patsies.

This method does have the Big-12 at #2 and the Pac-10 drops to #5 though.  The Big-Televen does remain #6 as the weakest BCS conference though.  It's kind of ironic then that the Big-Televen gets 2 BCS bowl berths then!