Now that the 2025 NCAA FBS season has finished, I was curious as to how productive teams have been from 2008 (the first season that I have all the data I use to estimate NCAA FBS team production) to 2025. The last time I evaluated the league was 2019, so it seems like this is a good time to update the analysis.
How did I make these calculations:
1. I created a model of NCAA FBS team production, (here are the details of the Complex Invasion College Football production model).
2. I downloaded the NCAA FBS team offense and defense data from www.cfbstats.com.
3. I made a few decisions:
one, was not to include the 2020 COVID-19 season as some teams did not play at all and most teams played a significantly reduced schedule of games;
two, I estimated both the offense and defense models as a panel (i.e. both cross-sectional and time series)
three, I clustered the standard errors of the model by conference, since most teams play the majority of their games against teams from their conference.
4. Then I ranked them by the team with this highest overall team production (i.e. offense production - defense production). The ranking is below for the top 25 most productive teams since 2008 (excluding 2020).
| Name | Season | |
| Indiana | 2025 | |
| Clemson | 2019 | |
| Florida State | 2013 | |
| Clemson | 2018 | |
| Ohio State | 2019 | |
| Georgia | 2021 | |
| Michigan | 2023 | |
| Florida | 2008 | |
| LSU | 2019 | |
| Georgia | 2022 | |
| Oregon | 2023 | |
| Alabama | 2016 | |
| Ohio State | 2025 | |
| Houston | 2011 | |
| Boise State | 2010 | |
| Ohio State | 2024 | |
| Texas Tech | 2025 | |
| Alabama | 2018 | |
| Indiana | 2024 | |
| Alabama | 2012 | |
| Alabama | 2017 | |
| Baylor | 2013 | |
| TCU | 2010 | |
| Alabama | 2019 | |
| Alabama | 2011 |