Open up this week's AP Top 25 and count the SEC logos. You'll get to ten. Texas is No. 1, Georgia is No. 2, and after that it's Alabama, Florida, Ole Miss, LSU, Mississippi State, Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri. That's ten of the league's 16 teams, or more than 60 percent of the conference, ranked in the top 25 at the end of September.

Now do the ACC. Miami at No. 4 and SMU at No. 21. That's it. Two of 17 teams. Duke, Wake Forest, Virginia Tech, Pittsburgh and Louisville all picked up votes, but none of them made the cut.

So the voters are telling us the SEC is five times as good as the ACC. Our numbers don't agree.

What the AP Poll Looks Like by Conference

Conference AP Top 25 Teams Teams Ranked
SEC 10 Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Ole Miss, LSU, Mississippi State, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri
Big Ten 6 Ohio State, Indiana, Iowa, Oregon, USC, UCLA
Big 12 5 BYU, Texas Tech, Utah, Oklahoma State, Houston
ACC 2 Miami, SMU
Other 2 Notre Dame, Boise State

What the MyGameSim Rankings Say

The MyGameSim college football rankings don't care about preseason hype, brand names or who beat whom by a touchdown in a game that came down to a missed field goal. They're built on adjusted offensive efficiency, adjusted defensive efficiency and strength of schedule. When you run the same count through our top 25, you get a very different picture.

Conference AP Top 25 MyGameSim Top 25
SEC 10 8
ACC 2 6
Big Ten 6 6
Big 12 5 3
Other 2 2

The ACC triples its count. Miami is No. 2 in our rankings, right behind Georgia. Pittsburgh is No. 9, Wake Forest is No. 13, Louisville is No. 21, SMU is No. 23 and Syracuse is No. 25. Duke (No. 29) and Virginia Tech (No. 32) are sitting just outside.

That's not a fluke of one weird metric either. Pitt has played the 0.918 strength of schedule and still posts a 138.0 adjusted offensive efficiency, which is better than Texas, LSU and Oklahoma. Wake Forest has faced a 0.965 SOS, one of the toughest slates in the country, and has a 66.0 adjusted defensive efficiency that ranks with the best defenses in the SEC. Neither team is ranked by the AP.

Where the SEC Is Getting Extra Credit

This isn't an argument that the SEC is bad. It's still the best conference in football by our numbers, and Georgia is the best team in the country. But a handful of those ten ranked SEC teams are getting the benefit of the doubt that the ACC never seems to get.

  • Ole Miss is No. 9 in the AP poll and No. 43 in ours. The defense is the problem, with an 87.0 adjusted defensive efficiency that sits in the bottom half of Power Four teams.
  • Tennessee is No. 17 in the AP and No. 44 with us.
  • Kentucky just moved into the AP poll at No. 24. It isn't in our top 50.
  • Missouri is No. 25 in the AP and No. 26 for us, which is close enough, but you could say the same thing about Syracuse or Duke.
  • Texas is the AP No. 1 with 62 first-place votes. We have the Longhorns at No. 14. The defense is elite, but a 113.7 adjusted offensive efficiency is ordinary for a team being called the best in the country.

Put Ole Miss, Tennessee and Kentucky side by side with Pittsburgh, Wake Forest and Louisville, and it's hard to find anything in the underlying numbers that justifies ranking the first group and leaving out the second. The only real difference is the conference patch on the jersey.

The Conference Rankings Tell the Same Story

Our new college football conference rankings take the same adjusted offense, adjusted defense and schedule strength and average them across every team in each league. Here's how the Power Four stacks up (the FBS Independents rank first overall, but that's just Notre Dame and UConn).

Rank Conference Teams Adj OE Adj DE SOS
2 SEC 16 123.7 76.6 0.812
3 ACC 17 121.5 81.1 0.716
4 Big Ten 18 123.8 83.5 0.714
5 Big 12 16 120.4 83.6 0.675

The ACC is the second best Power Four conference in the country, ahead of the Big Ten and the Big 12. Yet the Big Ten has six teams in the AP poll and the Big 12 has five, while the ACC has two. The SEC has a real edge, mostly on defense and schedule strength, but on average it's a gap of about two points of offense and four and a half points of defense. That's a lead. It isn't the kind of blowout that turns into ten ranked teams against two.

Why the Gap Exists

Part of it is reputation. Voters come into the season expecting the SEC to be the best league, so a 3-1 SEC team gets read as "lost a tough one" while a 3-1 ACC team gets read as "not very good." Part of it is TV. More SEC games land in the best time slots, so more voters actually watch them. And part of it is that losses inside the SEC get treated as proof of how deep the league is, while losses inside the ACC get treated as proof that nobody in it is any good.

None of that shows up in efficiency numbers. When you strip out the logos and just look at how well teams move the ball, how well they stop it and who they've played, the ACC looks a lot more like a conference with five or six top 25 caliber teams than one with two.

What to Watch

Rankings in September are mostly guesswork, and conference play will sort a lot of this out. But if Pitt, Wake Forest and Louisville keep winning and keep posting these numbers, the AP voters are going to have to explain why they keep sliding Kentucky and Tennessee into the poll ahead of them.

You can follow along with the MyGameSim team rankings and conference rankings every week, or run any of these matchups yourself in the MyGameSim simulator to see who really comes out on top.