2016 NCAA FBS Competitive Balance

Now that the NCAA FBS season is over, let's take a look at how competitive the "league" was this year. For the 2016 season the Noll-Scully Competitive Balance measure was 1.414 for all games played.  For those that are interested in calculating this on their own, here is a step-by-step guide as to how to perform the Noll-Scully competitive balance calculation.  Below is the Noll-Scully for FBS football since 2002.

As you can see from the chart above, that competitive balance among NCAA FBS teams has not changed much from one year to the next.  In fact the average Noll-Scully is 1.518 for this time period.  Of those listed only the 2005, 2014 and this past (2016) NCAA FBS seasons were more competitive than the average (i.e. had a Noll-Scully that was less than one standard deviation below the mean) and the 2003 and 2013 NCAA FBS seasons were less competitive than the average (i.e. had a Noll-Scully that was greater than one standard deviation above the mean).