I hope.
A new method for running the iterations came to my attention recently, and it allows me to run the pace calculations without having to see every box score. I only need the season totals for each team and a schedule table. So I went to the NCAA website and pulled the total plays from the offense and defense ranking pages. Not sure why the number of total plays is different, but whatever. Close enough. Below is a table showing pace by conference. This is simply the average value for the members of each league in each category. Because averaging out tends to pull numbers toward the mean, I added the SDEV column to show the standard deviation value for each conference. It's pretty clear how much more quickly the Big 12 played than the rest of the country. Even more striking is how much more quickly the conference played than the other BCS conferences. The pace SDEV ranking also is above 1.8 if you just consider the BCS conferences.
| 2008 College Football Pace by Conference | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conf | PPG | SDEV | Rk | Pace | SDEV | Rk |
| B12 | 70.80 | 1.82 | 1 | 69.42 | 1.60 | 1 |
| C-USA | 69.15 | 0.96 | 2 | 68.62 | 0.99 | 2 |
| Sun Belt | 68.87 | 0.81 | 3 | 68.46 | 0.86 | 3 |
| MAC | 68.08 | 0.40 | 4 | 67.97 | 0.49 | 4 |
| Big 10 | 68.08 | 0.40 | 5 | 67.77 | 0.34 | 5 |
| MWC | 67.83 | 0.27 | 7 | 67.63 | 0.23 | 6 |
| Pac-10 | 67.47 | 0.08 | 8 | 67.53 | 0.16 | 7 |
| WAC | 67.87 | 0.29 | 6 | 67.53 | 0.15 | 8 |
| ACC | 65.43 | -0.99 | 10 | 66.50 | -0.62 | 9 |
| Big East | 65.52 | -0.94 | 9 | 66.18 | -0.87 | 10 |
| SEC | 64.59 | -1.43 | 11 | 65.85 | -1.12 | 11 |
| Ind | 64.18 | -1.65 | 12 | 64.43 | -2.21 | 12 |
And here's a link to a table for the team rankings.