On Twitter this week, there was a tweet from fellow Student Union writer Clemson Carl that claimed the ACC would have a winning record if there was a conference round robin with the SEC and Big Ten.

If every team in the ACC played a round robin against every team in the Big 10 (or SEC for that matter) the ACC ends up with the winning record and I’ll die on this hill https://t.co/E38o7Zp8vV — Clemson Carl (@ClemsonCarl) November 20, 2019

Knowing this probably wasn’t true, I decided to look into it myself, using SP+, the benchmark for college football predictive models. The results I found did not look great for the ACC, of course.

Using SP+, the ACC would be 128-264 in a round robin against the SEC and Big Ten https://t.co/nmVfnRTdMc — Cody Goggin (@CodyGoggin) November 20, 2019

Naturally, fans of random ACC teams disagreed with using this method because it hates their teams, of course. SP+ is the best predictive model we have access to as college football fans and it is entirely acceptable to use for this purpose, as pointed out by the man himself, Bill Connelly.

That adjustment is to create a more accurate predictive measure, so using it for this type of simulation seems well within the realm of acceptable. — Bill Connelly (@ESPN_BillC) November 20, 2019

I received a request to do this for every conference and decided to delve into this farther. What would happen if there was a conference round robin among all of the members of the power five? I chose to undertake this task, and also add the American Athletic Conference to the mix, just for fun. Spoiler alert: This is still not good for the ACC.

Conference W L % Big Ten 71 125 36.2% Big 12 42 98 30% Pac 12 81 87 48.2% SEC 57 139 29.1% AAC 81 87 48.2% Total 332 536 38.25%

Yes, even the 6th “power” conference, the AAC would have a winning record in a round robin against the ACC. Let’s see how the other conferences fared.

Conference Results

Conference W L % ACC 332 536 38.25% Big Ten 499 369 57.49% Big 12 365 295 55.30% Pac 12 361 407 47.00% SEC 543 325 62.56% AAC 300 468 39.06%

As if there was any doubt, the SEC is the top conference in the country by this metric, as they should be. There are plenty of people who will dismiss this because “ESPN is biased and loves the SEC”, but it’s obvious that they are the strongest conference year-in and year-out, coming from an unbiased college football fan.

The Big 12, led by Oklahoma, and the Big Ten are on equal footing. The Pac 12 would be down one tier from there, with the ACC and AAC together at the bottom of this group. ACC fans can deny all they want, but the conference just isn’t strong this year and the numbers prove it.