At the end of every bowl season, the ESPN talking heads love to heap praise on whatever conference has the best bowl record.  What they fail to mention is the quality of opponent for “said” conference. 

We broke down the average computer ranking of the bowl opponents for each of the power conferences to see which, on paper, has the toughest row to hoe this bowl season.  Here is what we found…

Average computer ranking for each conference’s bowl opponents:

17.00

- SEC

17.80

- Pac-10

21.00

- Big Ten

26.57

- Big 12

38.00

- ACC

44.00

- Big East

So, what does this mean?  The SEC and Pac-10 have the toughest bowl games based on computer ranking.  The Big East and ACC have the easiest bowl schedules.  It’s just something to consider when evaluating a conference’s bowl success at the end of the day. More details after the jump…