The Most Exciting College Football Conferences, Ranked

College football is America’s most intensely regional sport. And allegiances don’t end with teams; they extend to entire college football conferences as well. No other sport makes a team’s division or conference such a central part of its identity. If you walked into a Pittsburgh Steelers game, you would never in a million years hear fans chanting for the AFC North. But you will occasionally hear fans of SEC football teams chanting “SEC! SEC! SEC!” because college sports are a beast all their own.

The 2022 season is not so much inching closer as it is rapidly closing in. We’re T-minus a month and a half until Nebraska and Northwestern meet in Dublin, Ireland, to start the Football Bowl Subdivision season on Aug. 27. Before they do that—and right as season previewing kicks into full gear—we’re ranking the 10 FBS conferences by how exciting they’ll be to watch in 2022 (an admittedly arbitrary determination). Every conference will have a boatload of storylines worth following, but here’s a primer on the most intriguing college football conferences to pay attention to this fall.