On Twitter this week, there was a tweet from fellow Student Union writer Clemson Carl that claimed the ACC would have a winning record if there was a conference round robin with the SEC and Big Ten.
Knowing this probably wasn’t true, I decided to look into it myself, using SP+, the benchmark for college football predictive models. The results I found did not look great for the ACC, of course.
Naturally, fans of random ACC teams disagreed with using this method because it hates their teams, of course. SP+ is the best predictive model we have access to as college football fans and it is entirely acceptable to use for this purpose, as pointed out by the man himself, Bill Connelly.
I received a request to do this for every conference and decided to delve into this farther. What would happen if there was a conference round robin among all of the members of the power five? I chose to undertake this task, and also add the American Athletic Conference to the mix, just for fun. Spoiler alert: This is still not good for the ACC.
| Conference | W | L | % |
| Big Ten | 71 | 125 | 36.2% |
| Big 12 | 42 | 98 | 30% |
| Pac 12 | 81 | 87 | 48.2% |
| SEC | 57 | 139 | 29.1% |
| AAC | 81 | 87 | 48.2% |
| Total | 332 | 536 | 38.25% |
Yes, even the 6th “power” conference, the AAC would have a winning record in a round robin against the ACC. Let’s see how the other conferences fared.
Conference Results
| Conference | W | L | % |
| ACC | 332 | 536 | 38.25% |
| Big Ten | 499 | 369 | 57.49% |
| Big 12 | 365 | 295 | 55.30% |
| Pac 12 | 361 | 407 | 47.00% |
| SEC | 543 | 325 | 62.56% |
| AAC | 300 | 468 | 39.06% |
As if there was any doubt, the SEC is the top conference in the country by this metric, as they should be. There are plenty of people who will dismiss this because “ESPN is biased and loves the SEC”, but it’s obvious that they are the strongest conference year-in and year-out, coming from an unbiased college football fan.
The Big 12, led by Oklahoma, and the Big Ten are on equal footing. The Pac 12 would be down one tier from there, with the ACC and AAC together at the bottom of this group. ACC fans can deny all they want, but the conference just isn’t strong this year and the numbers prove it.