The SEC Has an Edge. It Is 0.4 Points.
A reader wanted one number with no thumb on the scale. So we used a method that has never heard of a poll, a recruiting class or a conference. The SEC still finishes first — by 0.4 points. And for five straight seasons, the top league has not been separable from the second.
The question, and it came in almost word for word: can you give me a strength of schedule that does not cater to the SEC?
The answer: yes, and the SEC still wins it. Just by far less than anyone says. Its schedules rate 0.4 points harder than the Big Ten’s. That is about a fifth of a field goal.
Here is what surprised us. We expected to find a rating that flatters the SEC. Instead we found that the whole question is aimed at the wrong thing. Which league you play in is the small part of how hard your season is.
What you get: a way to test any ranking someone hands you.
A rating that knows nothing but the scores
The complaint behind the question is a fair one. Most published ratings start from preseason expectations, and preseason expectations are built partly from reputation. If a system already believes the SEC is strong, it will report that SEC schedules are strong. That is not measurement; that is an echo.
So we used a method that cannot do that. It sees only who played whom and by how much. No polls, no recruiting rankings, no conference labels. Give it every game of a season and it solves for one number per team: how much better than average you were, given who you faced. Then a team’s schedule strength is just the average rating of its opponents.
Run it on 2025 and the leagues finish in the order you would guess. SEC on top at +4.1, then the Big Ten at +3.7, the Big 12 at +2.9, the ACC at +1.5. So the ordering was never the problem.
The gap is too small to stand on
Now put an error bar on it, which nobody does.
A conference’s standing rests entirely on its games against outsiders. Games inside a league only rank its members against each other; they cannot say where the whole league sits. And there are not many outside games. Each SEC team played about three of them against another top-level opponent last year.
Resample those games and the SEC’s edge over the Big Ten runs from −1.6 to +5.9 points. That interval contains zero. The two leagues cannot be told apart.
We checked every season back to 2021. Not once could the top conference be separated from the second. The SEC does clear the ACC, and everyone clears the Group of Five. But the argument people actually have — SEC or Big Ten — is an argument the data refuses to settle.
A group average is only worth something when the group is tight. These groups are not tight.
The ProfessorYou are asking about the wrong unit
Look again at the figure and you will see the real finding. The rows sit almost on top of one another.
Take the 67 power-conference teams and split their schedule difficulty two ways. Which conference you are in accounts for 19% of it. Which teams you happened to draw inside that conference accounts for 81%.
Florida played the third-hardest schedule in the country. Tennessee played the 54th. Both are in the SEC, and they are 6.8 points apart — seventeen times the gap between the SEC and the Big Ten. UCLA and Maryland are both in the Big Ten and are 8.0 points apart.
So “he plays an SEC schedule” is close to meaningless as a defence of anyone. It tells you roughly nothing about the fixtures that were actually on his card. And notice which way it cuts: the strongest teams often draw the easiest schedules, because the one opponent you never have to play is yourself. Georgia ranked 37th. Ohio State ranked 33rd.
For the record, Notre Dame came 22nd, harder than 46 of the 67 power-conference schedules. We will take that one on the chin.
What to take home: ask how wide the group is
When someone gives you a group average, ask a second question before you use it: how spread out is the group?
If the spread inside each group is larger than the distance between them — and here it is many times larger — then the group label is close to worthless for judging any single member. Knowing a player’s league tells you little. Knowing his opponents tells you nearly everything.
You will meet this everywhere once you look. School district averages. Hospital rankings. Department salary bands. In each case the label is doing far less work than it appears to, and the honest move is the same one: ask for the spread, not just the middle.
And when a gap comes with no error bar, treat the gap as unmeasured. It usually is.
Baseball is ranked by championship leverage: we simulate the rest of the season 60,000 times, then split those seasons by who won each of today's games. College football cannot be simulated that way, so it is ranked by how close to a coin flip the ratings make it — a lopsided game teaches you nothing. Tomorrow this block reports what happened to today's pick.
Notes & sources
Every regular-season game from 2015 to 2025 with a final score, from the CollegeFootballData API: 24,730 games. The 2025 figures use 136 top-level teams. Sub-division opponents are pooled into a single rating rather than dropped, so that beating one still counts for something small.
The rating is a Simple Rating System — each team’s value is the average of its game margins plus the value of the opponent it faced, solved by iterating to a fixed point. Margins are capped at 28 points so that one blowout cannot dominate, and 2.5 points are removed for home field. It takes no input other than scores, dates and sites. Strength of schedule is the mean rating of a team’s opponents.
2025 conference schedule means: SEC +4.1, Big Ten +3.7, Big 12 +2.9, ACC +1.5, American −3.2, Mountain West −4.8, Sun Belt −5.3, Conference USA −7.7, Mid-American −8.2. Team strength means run higher (SEC +9.3, Big Ten +7.0) because a schedule averages in the weak opponents too.
Intervals come from resampling only the cross-conference games, 600 times, and re-solving the ratings each time — those games alone fix where a league sits relative to the rest of the country. SEC minus Big Ten: +2.3 in team strength, 95% interval −1.6 to +5.9. SEC minus ACC: +6.0, interval +2.8 to +9.5, which does clear zero. Seasons 2021 through 2025 each gave a top-two gap whose interval contained zero.
Variance split among the 67 power-conference teams: 18.6% between conferences, 81.4% within. Across all 132 rated teams in graded conferences the between share rises to 87.5%, because the Mid-American really does play an easier schedule than the SEC. Both numbers are true; the first is the one that answers the question asked.
Two limits. This is a completed-season rating, and it has to be: any preseason schedule strength must guess how good opponents will be, and every available guess imports reputation. That is a structural problem, not a failure of nerve at ESPN. Second, margin-based ratings reward running up the score, which the 28-point cap blunts but does not remove; a win-only version puts the same four leagues in the same order with wider intervals.
The question came from a reader, and it was a good one. Send yours: thesportspage.net/ask.html.
