NFL Players by College Conference

An authoritative and objective source for how BCS conferences stack up against each other is the NFL. You can throw out all the polls, fan bases, strength of schedule, affiliations, mismatches, and amateur opinions. With the NFL, you're talking about the highest level of football competition in the world, a league in which hundreds of people earn their livings by determining which players are worthy of contracts worth hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to play football and give their respective teams the best possible chance of winning the most important game in all of sports. Here is a list of how many former players from each BCS conference are in the NFL as of the start of the 2008 NCAA football season, listed from highest to lowest according to average number of players per college within each respective conference.

Rank...Conference...NFL Players Per College
1......SEC..........31.1
2......Big Ten......28.8
3......ACC..........27.8
4......Pac-10.......27.3
5......Big 12.......20.5
6......Big East.....18.3

source: ESPN

These numbers are probably somewhat inflated because NFL rosters had not yet been finalized. If you use only players who played in the NFL during the 2007 season, these are the numbers:

Rank...Conference...NFL Players Per College
1......SEC..........25.0
2......Big Ten......24.5
3......ACC..........23.0
4......Pac-10.......20.9
5......Big 12.......16.8
6......Big East.....12.6

source: databaseFootball.com