Which conference is best? It’s hard to tell

Over the next few weeks, when debating the order of the teams in the BCS standings, there will be a lot of talk about conference strength, and which conferences are good and which are bad.

I decided to take a look at the results of games between teams from different BCS conferences this year — a crude way to look at conference strength because of the small sample size, but an easy way to compare the conferences.

How each conference has done in games against other BCS conferences:

Pac-10 5-3
Big 10 5-4
*SEC 5-5
Big East 7-8
*ACC 7-8
Big 12 5-6

*Note: The SEC and ACC still have four games left between each other

The first thing that jumps out at me is how close all of them are to each other. Because of this, I can’t really draw any conclusions from this like I’d hoped to. The Pac-10 has the best winning percentage in games against other BCS conference opponents, but it also has the fewest played because Pac-10 teams play nine conference games while the other conferences play eight (or in the case of the Big East, seven). The conclusion I draw the most from this — it’s really hard to evaluate how good conferences are, which is yet another reason to have a playoff system of some kind

A list of all the games pitting teams from different BCS conferences against each other: