NCAA FBS Competitive Balance - Part III

Previously I have looked at competitive balance in the NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) for all games played in a season (regular season FBS games, regular season Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) games and post-season bowl games), and then for just regular season (FBS and FCS) games.  Now what I want to do is just look at regular season games against only by FBS teams.  To do that I have deleted all the standings data associated with football opponents that at the time were not FBS teams.

To provide some perspective, I have included in the table below all three Noll-Scully competitive balance measures for the 2002 through 2012 NCAA FBS seasons.  You will notice that competitive balance is about 6% worse using only the regular season FBS standings data (column 3) as compared to the full standings data (column 1).  Given that the Big 10 and SEC conference have been talking about increasing the number of regular season conference games, I would expect that competitive balance would actually decrease by a small amount, as some teams that would have played an FCS school (and most likely won that game), will now have to play against a better opponent and have a lower winning percentage and thus lead to more competitive imbalance (higher Noll-Scully number).

Season		Full		Regular		Regular FBS
2002		1.539		1.527		1.651
2003		1.612		1.599		1.702
2004		1.462		1.458		1.549
2005		1.435		1.399		1.518
2006		1.579		1.560		1.633
2007		1.458		1.451		1.544
2008		1.458		1.466		1.588
2009		1.519		1.512		1.620
2010		1.526		1.508		1.581
2011		1.515		1.486		1.592
2012		1.579		1.561		1.698
Average		1.516		1.503		1.607