Happy Saturday, oh great and wonderful college football fans. We are in recruiting/coaching replacement/prepping for conference realignment/NFL playoff mode lately, and the GCR will soon be working solely on getting ready for next season. Today’s blog is all about the final FBS conference rankings for 2022 and my final (maybe, who knows for sure) post until around late April/early May will be a new feature on most improved and most un-improved teams, coming in the next week or so. The first official post of the 2023 season will be detailing the conference changes for next season (and the next). In between is the background coding of the GCR so that teams show up where they should and such.
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To rank the FBS, I looked at a couple of different factors, and settled on average GCR rank as the ordering, but there are a few different ways to read the following table. It is worst conference to winner of the GCR Conference Trophy (much fought after, I’m sure), but also shows the average SOS Rank per conference as a comparison. Included in the table is the average wins/losses per team. I like the average better because total wins will always favor a 14-team conference over a 10- or 12-team conference. I included each conference’s non-conference winning percentage. Why separate out the in-conference games? Sort of the same reason. First, conference games are always at a .500 clip and larger conferences have more conference games, in total, than smaller conferences. Second, mathematically, the conference games “normalize” the overall winning percentage towards .500. Also, included are the bowl records because those have the final impact on a conference’s overall strength and are all non-conference (except for a potential same conference championship game, which didn’t happen this year). I also show the number of teams with 10 or more wins combined with the number of teams with a .500 or better record. Note: this means that 6-6 teams who lost their bowl game are no longer above .500.
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For the Group of 5, only the American and the Sun Belt were able to really shine. Not to jump too far ahead, but the American may be looking at a drop in quality with the upcoming line-up changes and the Sun Belt is poised to take over as top dog. That is going to be critical in the 12-team playoff coming our way soon. In 2021, the Pac 12 was the worst Power 5 conference, but this year they jumped to the number 2 spot. Check out all 11 conferences from sad to elated below:
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| Rank | Conference | Avg Record | NC Pct | 10+/.500 Teams | Bowl Record | Best Team | Average Ranking | Average SOS (Rank) |
| 11 | MAC (12) | 5.92 – 6.75 | .407 | 1/5 | 4-2 (.667) | Ohio (10-4/54) | 102.75 | 103.50 (10) |
| 10 | Conference USA (11) | 6.09 – 6.73 | .431 | 1/5 | 3-3 (.500) | UTSA (11-3/25) | 102.73 | 105.55 (11) |
| 9 | Mountain West (12) | 6.00 – 6.75 | .418 | 3/6 | 3-4 (.429) | Air Force (10-3/29) | 91.75 | 96.92 (8) |
| 8 | Independents (7) | 6.43 – 6.29 | .507 | 0/5 | 3-2 (.600) | Notre Dame (9-4/19) | 89.14 | 87.86 (7) |
| 7 | Sun Belt (14) | 6.50 – 6.00 | .557 | 2/7 | 3-4 (.429) | Troy (12-2/17) | 87.57 | 98.21 (9) |
| 6 | American (11) | 6.64 – 6.18 | .549 | 1/7 | 4-3 (.571) | Tulane (12-2/14) | 82.18 | 85.55 (6) |
| 5 | Big 12 (10) | 7.21 – 5.57 | .692 | 2/5 | 2-7 (.222) | TCU (13-2/6) | 46.30 | 29.9 (2) |
| 4 | ACC (14) | 7.00 – 5.57 | .656 | 2/9 | 5-4 (.556) | Clemson (11-3/8) | 44.35 | 44.86 (5) |
| 3 | Big Ten (14) | 7.21 – 5.57 | .725 | 3/9 | 5-4 (.556) | Michigan (13-1/2) | 41.14 | 35.71 (3) |
| 2 | Pac 12 (12) | 7.00 – 5.75 | .674 | 5/6 | 3-4 (.429) | Washington (11-2/9) | 39.58 | 38.58 (4) |
| 1 | SEC (14) | 8.07 – 4.93 | .823 | 4/9 | 7-5 (.583) | Georgia (15-0/1) | 32.79 | 18.50 (1) |
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The SEC had the best team, the most bowl wins, the best non-conference record, and the 3 schools who didn’t go bowling were all 5-7, giving the conference the most difficult schedule, collectively, as well. That’s it for this episode. Thanks for tuning in and we will see you soon, G.
