Do you know of a website (or websites) that has the statistics of NCAA Division 1 Conferences when playing one another? For instance, are their official records of how the SEC has fared against the Big 10, the ACC, the Pac-10, etc.?
I have located individual schools’ records against all teams they have played as far back as records have been kept, but so far, nothing that has conference vs. conference.
Any help?
A sight I’ve found use full is:
http://www.cfbdatawarehouse.com/
I think it has what you are looking for
Thanks a bunch. Looks good.
Remember that interconference stats are hard to use a barometer of how good a football conference is. Teams don’t play many interconference games and there isn’t much balance to the schedules.
How well I know. That probably accounts for how few websites there are that delve into such matters. On the other hand, having to depend on the word of sportscasters and sportswriters, with obvious axes to grind, is not much better. And letting polls and opinions direct traffic in determining “National Champion” only continues this glaring lack.
As you can probably guess (I’ve said as much elsewhere on SDMB) I’m an Auburn fan who feels that the BCS robbery last year is probably going to continue into the foreseeable future. But I have seen at least one projection for bowl games this coming year that would pair Auburn with Oklahoma. That would be great to see, as would a return match with USC. Auburn was blown off the field on that last meeting, but much has changed in the meanwhile.
I agree with you, BobT, that we need better measures than just raw statistics to determine strengths of conferences. But until this rises to the level of interest that BCS and bowl play has, raw statistics are about all that makes any sense – at least to me.
Discussion?
Given the records after regular season and conference championship games, one of the three teams was gonna get screwed.
Personally, I thought Auburn was better than Oklahoma. Southern Cal; who knows? The point being that under the existing setup, if there are three teams with perfect records who played respectable schedules, somebody’s left out. This doesn’t happen very often, but last year it did.
As far as Auburn’s 2004 season is concerned, in order of importance: State Champs, Conference Champs and Sugar Bowl champs. Beat Tennessee twice in one season, and whipped the Cringin’ Turds to stay undefeated in Tuscaloser. Well, the National Championship would have been nice, but it don’t get much better than last season.
WAR EAGLE!
JCoM, Auburn '69
War Eagle back atcha. I didn’t attend Auburn but my dad was an alumnus, 1933 I think, and he was able to boast before his death in 1995 that he had seen more Auburn football games than he had missed, and that included games since 1892.
The first game I can remember seeing, and all I really remember was that it was cold and raining, was the Auburn-Alabama game in 1948. We lived in Clanton at the time and going to Legion Field was a big deal then and on up into adulthood for me. Even after I moved to Tennessee, my brother and I would drive down for the Iron Bowl game many years. That 1948 Iron Bowl was the first time the two Bama teams had played each other since way back when.
Lately I’ve been hearing that Bama wants to phase out the rivalry with Auburn in favor of elevating the UT series as a more “important” one. Bullshit! You don’t get rid of a rivalry just because you can’t win the games any more. I’m all for the Tennessee games with both Bama teams being a big deal, just as Georgia is a biggie with Auburn, but the Iron Bowl will always (for me at least) be the biggest game of any year. Bowls are okay, but the Iron Bowl is what football is all about.
Here’s the main problem with comparing interconference records.
Let’s make up a hypothetical schedule.
Let’s say ACC power Florida State schedules three nonconference games.
They will have one against Florida as a rivalry game, but the other two could likely be at home against some bottom feeder in the Big 10 (Illinois) or Big 12 (Baylor).
Then you might have a mid-level team in a non-BCS conference. Let’s call them New Mexico. The Lobos would be lucky to get any top level team to travel to Albuquerque to play. So they will go on the road to places like Michigan, Kansas State, and USC.
There’s just no way to compare.
I used to be a believer in being able to determine who is better based on stats etc. (It all started when my Huskies split with Miami in the early 90’s, I watched both teams and felt we were better, and began following the stats at that point).
But the bottom line is no formula will ever solve last years problem. If you have 3 teams that appear on paper to be deserving, one is going to get screwed.
Now if you expand it to a 4 team playoff with teams selected by formula, you might be ok.
Any team ranked 5th is far enough away from being ranked #1 that the argument is less valid.
I’m bumping this zombie to see if there’s anything new on the issue in the past 10 years! 
I would like to hope that bowl games might help to decide the long-term strengths by conference (using current alignments if possible) so if there’s a place where those records are maintained that would be fun to look at. Regular season scheduling of cupcakes from other conferences, less so.
As a first step to finding an answer to this question I’m going to look at
and perhaps crunch some numbers based on current conference alignments.
A great deal of that kind of information is compiled by the Elias Sports Bureau, which keeps its data under a vigorously protected copyright, available only at considerable cost. Elias has driven a lot other people out of the market for sports statistical data, just by sheer volume. Play-by-play commentators with arcane trivia have Elias to thank for access to that. Like, second youngest player ever go get two bases-loaded walks in a Sunday game wearing uniform number 9 against one pitcher throwing right handed and one left – the youngest lwas Coaker Triplett in 1938. Elias’ data base can find that in seconds.
Yeah, it’s called the College Football Playoff. Way much better than that BCS crap.
No doubt it’s a better system, but it doesn’t have a long history yet. I’m looking for some reliable figures on which conferences have the best records against each other.
One thing that has changed in the last 10 years is that threads like this now go in the Game Room. 
Moving thread from General Questions to The Game Room.
I’ve done something like this in the past. It is generally pretty difficult, as there really isn’t a lot of information to go on. On top of that, each major conference has teams that suck year after year and will drag the conference record down with them (do you really want to judge the SEC by the performance of Vanderbilt?). This is what I have for 2014, excluding bowl games (may be some errors):
ACC (10-7 vs. Big 5 + ND, 7 losses to others)
Big 12 (4-6 vs. Big 5 + ND, 2 losses to others)
Big 10 (6-11 vs. Big 5 + ND, 3 losses to others)
PAC-12 (7-3 vs. Big 5 + ND, 1 losses to others)
SEC (5-7 vs. Big 5 + ND, 1 loss to others)
As can be seen, I just lumped all of the big 5 conferences (plus Notre Dame) together. I just note the losses to non-power conferences, because I don’t care that major team A slaughtered minnow B.
I think in previous years (I no longer have the files for those), the Pac-xx traditionally played more major teams out of conference than any other conference. In previous years, the SEC generally did better than 2014.
Thanks! I was even planning to request such a move if it got much action.
I found this site just now which may have some of the answers:
All-Time Division 1-A College Football Standings Since 1945
http://michigan-football.com/ncaa/ncaa_1a.htm
This is not the entire picture by any means, but looking at the Bowl Records of teams that have scored BETTER than .500 Winning Percentage and pointing out the SEC teams in the group we have:
New Mexico State 2 0 1 3 .833 1960 1960 Sun Bowl
Marshall 9 2 0 11 .818 2014 2014 Boca Raton Bowl [8]
Utah 14 4 0 18 .778 2014 2014 Las Vegas Bowl [22]
Miami (Ohio) 7 2 0 9 .777 2010 2011 GoDaddy.com Bowl [8]
UNLV 3 1 0 4 .750 2013 2014 Heart of Dallas Bowl (January) [2]
Boise State 10 5 0 15 .667 2014 2014 Fiesta Bowl (December) [4][12]
San Jose State 6 3 0 9 .667 2012 2012 Military Bowl
South Florida 4 2 0 6 .667 2010 2010 Meineke Car Care Bowl
Southern California 33 17 0 50 .660 2014 2014 Holiday Bowl [35][1][24]
Vanderbilt 4 2 1 7 .643 2013 2013 BBVA Compass Bowl SEC
Toledo 9 5 0 14 .643 2014 2015 GoDaddy Bowl [14]
Oklahoma State 16 9 0 25 .640 2014 2015 Cactus Bowl [6]
Ole Miss 23 13 0 36 .639 2014 2014 Peach Bowl SEC
Penn State 28 15 2 45 .633 2014 2014 Pinstripe Bowl [33][34]
Syracuse 15 9 1 25 .620 2013 2013 Texas Bowl [6]
Florida State 25 15 2 42 .619 2014 2015 Rose Bowl [18][19]
Oregon State 9 6 0 15 .600 2013 2013 Hawaii Bowl [1][22]
Rutgers 6 4 0 10 .600 2014 2014 Quick Lane Bowl [11]
Wake Forest 6 4 0 10 .600 2011 2011 Music City Bowl [1]
Army 3 2 0 5 .600 2010 2010 Armed Forces Bowl [1][11]
Connecticut 3 2 0 5 .600 2010 2011 Fiesta Bowl
Oklahoma 28 19 1 48 .594 2014 2014 Russell Athletic Bowl
Georgia 28 19 3 50 .590 2014 2014 Belk Bowl SEC
Auburn 22 15 2 38 .590 2014 2015 Outback Bowl SEC
Alabama 34 24 3 61 .582 2014 2015 Sugar Bowl [5] SEC
Rice 7 5 0 12 .571 2014 2014 Hawaii Bowl
Memphis 4 3 0 7 .571 2014 2014 Miami Beach Bowl [26]
Georgia Tech 24 19 0 43 .558 2014 2014 Orange Bowl (December)
Mississippi State 10 8 0 18 .556 2014 2014 Orange Bowl (December) SEC
North Carolina State 15 12 1 28 .554 2014 2014 St. Petersburg Bowl
Washington State 6 5 0 11 .545 2013 2013 New Mexico Bowl [6]
Boston College 13 11 0 24 .542 2014 2014 Pinstripe Bowl [1][11]
Kentucky 8 7 0 15 .533 2010 2011 BBVA Compass Bowl SEC
Purdue 9 8 0 17 .529 2012 2013 Heart of Dallas Bowl
Texas 27 24 2 53 .528 2014 2014 Texas Bowl
Tennessee 26 24 0 50 .520 2014 2015 Taxslayer Bowl SEC
Arizona State 14 13 1 28 .518 2014 2014 Sun Bowl [6]
Iowa 14 13 1 28 .518 2014 2015 TaxSlayer Bowl
Clemson 19 18 0 37 .514 2014 2014 Russell Athletic Bowl [1][6]
Florida 21 20 0 41 .512 2014 2015 Birmingham Bowl SEC
LSU 23 22 1 46 .511 2014 2014 Music City Bowl SEC
Please note that perennial bottom feeder Vanderbilt has the BEST score of the conference! There are four SEC teams with lower than .500 all-time results.
Anybody else want to do the work for the other conferences or at least their Favorite(s)?
Here’s another source that’s a few years behind the times:
http://www.footballgeography.com/college-football-conference-vs-conference-bowl-records/
Conference vs. Conference Bowl Records – (1901-2011)
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I just want to point out that Bowl records are a terrible way to evaluate teams from different conferences. Some teams (Big Ten, for example) want desperately to win at all costs. It means a lot to fans and especially donors. Others (PAC-12 and Big XII), unless they are representing their conference in the Rose or Orange Bowl, for example, treat Bowl Games as a reward for a good season. All the coaches bring their families, who they haven’t seen all season, have huge happy hour parties every night, go to sponsored dinners where they drink more, and don’t worry too much about the outcome of the game.
Colorado once switched from option to pro style offense during the off-season (Kordell Stewart was coming in) and played their Bowl Game pro-style after three weeks of practice.