Here is the criteria for the average ranking of the highest ranked team (from link above):
"Average Ranking of Highest-Ranked Team, the ranking of the highest-ranked team in the final BCS Standings each year (if a conference does not place a team in the final BCS Standings, then its highest-ranked team is determined by the conference member that has the highest average ranking in the computer rankings used in the BCS Standings)".
Note that the calculation is based on the final BCS Standings, so here are the links to the final BCS standings for the 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 seasons that I will be drawing from to make this calculation.
If you have opened the .pdf files in the previous sentence, you will notice that not all of the eleven conferences are represented in each of the four seasons. Thus as stated in the criteria, I have to calculate the highest average ranking in the computer rankings used in the BCS Standings for that time period. Frankly, I thought that I would be unable to figure this out, but this data is available for the 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 seasons. I will be using this data for the second criteria as well.
Here's the final results, and then below, I will sketch out how I calculated these results below.
| Rank | Ave. | Conference |
| 1 | 1.25 | SEC |
| 2 | 3.25 | Big12 |
| 3 | 4.50 | P12 |
| 4 | 5.75 | MountainWest |
| 5 | 7.75 | Big10 |
| 6 | 13.00 | ACC |
| 7 | 15.00 | BigEast |
| 8 | 33.96 | CUSA |
| 9 | 37.42 | MidAmerican |
| 10 | 44.83 | WAC |
| 11 | 58.79 | SunBelt |
The calculation is rather straightforward.
1. For each season find the conference member that has the highest ranking, and for conferences that are not ranked, then find the average of the six computer models and use the one that has the highest rank. So in 2008, there were no CUSA teams ranked in the top 25, so I found all the teams and aveaged the rankings of the six computer models and found that East Carolina was the highest ranked with an average of 41.5. Then for CUSA, I entered 41.5 for their rank in 2008.
2. Repeat step 1 for each of the remaining three seasons.
3. Average the ranking for each of the eleven conferences, and sort from highest rank (lowest number) of the eleven conferences. That's it.