NCAA FBS Competitive Balance - Part II

Yesterday I blogged about competitive balance for NCAA FBS from 2002 to 2012, and reported that the NCAA FBS is very similar to the NFL.  I also gave a reason why different leagues of the same sport have similar levels of competitive balance, but different sports have different levels of competitive balance.  Today, I want to clean up one issue that I mentioned yesterday - that the data I was using had both regular season and post-season (bowl games) results in the standings data.  For comparison purposes, I will include the Noll-Scully competitive balance metric with the bowl games as well, which is the column labeled "Full" and just the regular season standings data labeled "Regular".

Season		Full		Regular
2002		1.539		1.527
2003		1.612		1.599
2004		1.462		1.458
2005		1.435		1.399
2006		1.579		1.560
2007		1.458		1.451
2008		1.458		1.466
2009		1.519		1.512
2010		1.526		1.508
2011		1.515		1.486
2012		1.579		1.561
Average		1.516		1.503

As you can see from the table above, the NCAA FBS "league" is a little more competitive without including the bowl game results.  (Remember, the closer the Noll-Scully gets to one the more that the league would have an equal playing strength in a statistical sense).  So, with the average over the time period moving from 1.516 to 1.503 over the last eleven years, competitive balance excluding the bowl games improves by less than one percent.

That still leaves the question about how much would the "leagues" competitive balance change if I excluded non-league games.  Non-league games would be games played against FCS schools.  I will work on figuring out which teams are FCS schools for the eleven seasons, and then drop them from the standings data and re-calculate the Noll-Scully competitive balance metric.  I hope to get to this tomorrow, but no guarantees.