Baby woke me up early this morning, so I ran some numbers on this year's interconference games between the Power Four conferences.
There were 32 Power Four interconference games. The ACC played the most, with 20. Then the SEC with 19, the Big Ten with 13, and the Big 12 with 12.
Looking at things from a straight wins and losses standpoint, the records are as follows:
ACC: 9-11 (0.450) overall; 3-1 (0.750) vs Big 12; 3-2 (0.600) vs Big Ten; 3-8 (0.273) vs SEC
Big 12: 4-8 (0.333) overall; 1-3 (0.250) vs ACC; 1-3 (0.250) vs Big Ten; 2-2 (0.500) vs SEC
Big Ten: 6-7 (0.462) overall; 2-3 (0.400) vs ACC; 3-1 (0.750) vs Big 12; 1-3 (0.250) vs SEC
SEC: 13-6 (0.684) overall; 8-3 (0.727) vs ACC; 2-2 (0.500) vs Big 12; 3-1 (0.750) vs Big Ten
Based on this, we can rank the conferences:
| Rank | Conference | Win % |
| 1 | SEC | 0.684 |
| 2 | Big Ten | 0.462 |
| 3 | ACC | 0.450 |
| 4 | Big 12 | 0.333 |
But this is pretty surface-level. After all, it matters what the matchups are. You can't have, say, the top five Big 12 teams go undefeated against the bottom five SEC teams and say "the biG 12 is betTER THan tHE SEc."
I made a table of every single game and set the advantage in the game to whichever team had the better conference win percentage. If the conferences are equal, a .750 team from the SEC should be evenly matched with a .750 team from the Big 12. This is obviously not the case. Only one game (Auburn vs Cal) was a push. I tallied up the records of each conference in games in which its team had the advantage and in games in which its team had the disadvantage.
Overall, the team with the advantage went 20-11 (0.645). Using this, I did an extremely crude adjustment for each conference. I scaled their win percentage in games based on what their win percentage would be expected to be. For example, if a team went 0.355 in games in which they had the disadvantage, that's exactly what you'd expect to see, so it would scale up to 0.500. If a team went 0.355 in games in which they had the
advantage, however, that's a major underachievement and would scale down to 0.275. I then took a weighted average of the scaled win percentages to obtain a new win percentage for each conference. The numbers in the table are the record of the conference in the first column against the conference in the top row. The main diagonal (e.g., Big 12 vs Big 12) is the conference's adjusted overall win percentage.
| ACC | Big 12 | Big Ten | SEC |
| ACC | 0.423 | 0.740 | 0.592 | 0.232 |
| Big 12 | 0.194 | 0.311 | 0.194 | 0.546 |
| Big Ten | 0.564 | 0.740 | 0.553 | 0.352 |
| SEC | 0.737 | 0.546 | 0.581 | 0.664 |
Note that these numbers don't add up to 1.000 the way they would with actual win percentages. Like I said:
extremely crude adjustment. Anway, you can see that the SEC is the best conference no matter how you draw it up. It absolutely ate the ACC's lunch in head-to-heads. The Big Ten and ACC ate the Big 12's lunch head-to-head as well.
Keep this in your pocket the next time someone tries to tell you that it's just bias when you say the SEC is the best conference.
