Parity has arrived in college football — and there’s a ton of data to back it up

If you think college football feels especially crazy at the halfway point, it’s because it’s been a truly loony season.

Teams ranked in the top 10 of the Associated Press poll have lost 14 games through Week 7, tied for the most of any season the past decade.

No season defines chaos in modern college football terms quite like 2007. Yet AP top 10 teams through Week 7 in 2007 had a better win percentage (77.6%) than top 10 teams this year (75.4%).

The 2007 season was an aberration, a transition away from early-2000s powers like USC, Texas and Ohio State to an era in which the best teams in the sport almost all resided in the Southeast.

College football’s 2025 campaign also signals a seismic shift for the sport. Schools are paying players directly for the first time via revenue sharing, and players are allowed to transfer an unlimited number of times in their career. But unlike 2007 where power just pooled at the top elsewhere — Alabama, Georgia, Clemson, among others — the 2025 upsets and disruptions portend a different trend.

The 2025 season is a tapestry of parity, or at least a version of it where the teams at the top of the sport have fallen slightly from their lofty peaks while those in the middle are climbing fast.

“I think it goes without saying it’s brought an equality across the country,” Oklahoma coach Brent Venables, a coordinator for two Clemson national title teams, said of revenue sharing and the transfer portal. “There’s a closing of the gap with the new environment.”

Look no further than the preseason AP Poll.

Texas, Penn State, Clemson and Notre Dame all ranked in the top six. They’re a combined 16-10 so far while those like No. 3 Indiana and No. 7 Texas Tech have rocketed into the top 10.

We’re still early in the year. Sometimes stories like Indiana and Texas Tech end up being fool’s gold. But there’s evidence in the advanced analytics that the gap between the top teams and a tier of around 20-30 hopefuls chasing them has closed.

The SP+ ratings, created by ESPN’s Bill Connelly, measure a team’s down to down efficiency and forecasts how sustainable a team’s success may be across a season. They’re a useful power ranking tool that can contextualize how Ohio State would stack up against Texas Tech.

Check out the difference in those ratings from 2017 (the oldest year available with weekly data) and 2025 through Week 7:

2025 SP+ Rankings

2017 SP+ Rankings

The best way to think of those SP+ ratings is the difference in points if two teams played each other. For example, if 2025 Ohio State played 2017 Ohio State, the 2017 version would be favored by 1.2 points in Connelly’s metric.

So, consider this: The gap between No. 1 to No. 25 in 2017 was 17.6 points.

That’s the same gap between No. 1 Ohio State and No. 40 South Carolina in 2025.

The metrics are even tighter if you remove the No. 1 team from that calculus. The difference between No. 2 Oregon (25.1) and No. 25 Iowa (15.6) is 9.5 points. Back in 2017 that gap between No. 2 Alabama (27.6) and No. 25 LSU (11.2) was 16.4 points. That’s a touchdown shift in nine years.

“It basically looks like you took some of the power at the top and redistributed it elsewhere,” Connelly said.

What’s caused the talent redistribution

It’s no secret the collision of the transfer portal and NIL/revenue sharing changed the way talent is distributed in the sport. That’s illustrated when you look at a the five-star distribution in the 247Sports Composite.

Teams that signed/have committed 5-Star 247Sports Composite recruits

*Players in the 2026 class can’t sign until December

You can see the difference on current college rosters, too. The 247Sports Team Talent Composite is a metric that rates rosters based on how the players ranked as recruits. It’s not a ranking that dictates who will be good. It is, however, a predictive measure of who can compete. Since the Team Talent Composite debuted in 2015, there’s never been a team ranked outside the top 15 that’s won a national championship.

But the gap between that top group and everyone else is shrinking. Check out the point difference between No. 1 and No. 25 in 2025 versus what it was in 2017:

For a bit of context, only 16 teams had 800-plus points in the 2017 Team Talent. The 2025 version has 22 teams above that threshold.

“(Rev share and NIL) has added a very big carrot that isn’t simply based on where I think I can win a national title,” Connelly said. “It’s no longer if Alabama offers me, I’m supposed to go to Alabama. Maybe Tennessee is offering me more money or whatever, so I’ll go there instead. It’s just given recruits another powerful thing to think about.”

The playing field is further equalized by the portal.

Power Four teams do raid each other on occasion for their best players. Generally, however, they’re taking the best talent from Group of Six and FCS rosters. Consider this, 66.7% of returning first-team all-conference players from the G-5 level opted to enter the transfer portal during the winter cycle last year.

That’s two-thirds of the best returning players from the Group of Six choosing to jump up to the Power Four.  In comparison, zero returning Power Four first-team all-conference players entered the portal during the winter window.

Some of those Group of Six and FCS players end up at an Alabama or an Ohio State. Many of them, however, transfer to programs like Cincinnati, Vanderbilt or Nebraska — all of which are top 30 teams in SP+ this season.

A few years ago, a Cincinnati or say a Virginia didn’t have the NIL money to keep up with the best teams in the country. But then every Power Four team got an infusion of rev share cash, usually around $14 million-$16 million. That’s made the middle of the Power Four far more competitive.

Not only can those teams go get some of the best Group of Five talent. But they can poach the contender’s depth. Gone are the days Alabama could hoard five-star recruits for three years, incubating them until they were seniors and ready to star.

Those players transfer early in search of playing time, and the result is more teams with close to equivalent talent.

“There’s been a closed gap,” Georgia coach Kirby Smart said. “If you’re talking about the bottom 10%, I think the gap is greater. If you’re talking about the median, then I think it’s closer, because there are a lot of teams in the Power Four that don’t have the capacity, and they get poached and picked over. Then there’s a middle section that has plenty of money and they go and get the top section’s backups and get closer to them.”

Three different types of parity

When thinking about the idea of parity in college football, Connelly uses three buckets:

1. Power Four vs. Group of Six
2. Top of the Power Four vs. bottom of the Power Four
3. Heavyweights vs. light heavyweights

The first and second buckets don’t reflect a parity surge. Instead, they show what is obvious every year in portal. Mid- and high-end Power Four teams go out and pick off the best Group of Five players annually.

Look at the SP+ difference between the average power conference team versus non-power conference team through Week 7 of the 2017 and 2025 seasons.

That’s almost a full touchdown difference in just nine years between the autonomy and non-autonomy leagues.

The second form of parity, the top of the Power Four versus the bottom, hasn’t really moved much over the last nine years. If you take the average of the 10 best and 10 worst autonomy teams in both seasons, the gap is slightly wider in 2025, but only by a quarter of a point. If you look at the 2018 data, the gap between the top 10 teams was actually 1.5 points wider than it is in 2025.

But you are starting to see the top 20 to 25% of the FBS separate.

The average scoring margin of AP Top 25 teams versus everyone else this season is 25.1 points, the highest through Week 7 over the last decade. It’s that third category where the gap is closing. To understand that there’s no better league to examine than the SEC.

Parity in the SEC

Go back to the 2017 SP+ rankings and you’d find a pair of SEC teams (Alabama, Georgia) in the top five at the midway point of the season. Expand that out to the top 20 and there were only three total with Auburn entering the mix.

Nearly a decade later and there is only one SEC team in the top five (Texas A&M), but the league’s teams take up 10 of the top 20 spots.

It used to be that Alabama and Georgia annually ran the league thanks to their overwhelming recruiting advantage. That’s no longer the case. The Tide and Bulldogs remain the most talented teams in the SEC, but they have a more difficult time keeping that depth while programs like Ole Miss or LSU — good recruiting schools but not always elite ones — have the money to bolster their roster annually in the portal. 

Think of the example of Damon Wilson. He was supposed to be next up in Georgia’s edge room after the Bulldogs lost a pair of edge rushers to the first round of the NFL Draft. But Wilson opted not to wait. He hopped in the transfer portal and chose Missouri. A few months later the Tigers are a SEC contender with Wilson grading out as the SEC’s best edge defender, per PFF. Meanwhile, Georgia ranks 116th nationally in sacks. 

Throw in Oklahoma and Texas into the mix, and the SEC is deeper than it’s ever been from top to bottom. 

That’s reflecting on the field each Saturday. The average scoring margin in SEC games through Week 7 is just 10.7 points. That’s the second-lowest total this century behind 2008 (10.3). If you look at the data since 2017, the average scoring margin in SEC games is almost half of what it was nine years ago. 

“I do think it’s changed starting with the transfer portal and then NIL,” Tennessee coach Josh Heupel said. “If you look at the scope of this league and the resources everybody has, it’s allowed teams to retain players. But I think maybe the biggest impact is each team in the offseason can patch their roster in areas where they may be thin or not have a guy they feel is ready. They’re able to get somebody who’s played football at a really high level.”

Added LSU head coach Brian Kelly: “The common dominator is there’s more depth of talent across the league. It’s not just stockpiled in one place. … You just have more teams in the hunt because of it.”

Is parity here to stay?

College football is cyclical. Dynasties rise and fall. Rule changes upend the status quo and new powers emerge.

It’s easy to say in this moment the 12-playoff in conjunction with revenue share and the portal changed college football’s contending class forever. But who’s to say new dynastic-like programs don’t emerge in the future that change that calculus?

It could happen this year.

Ohio State is your defending national champion and sitting at 6-0. Connelly believes the Buckeyes can still hit another gear and render any discussion of parity a moot point.

“We saw (parity) last year, too, it’s just Ohio State hit the gas at the end, and it distracted us a little bit,” Connelly said. “Georgia in 2022 was unbelievable. Michigan in 2023 was good but not quite that good. Ohio State’s was pretty good but not quite as good as Michigan. …

“One thing I wonder about too, especially with Ohio State, they know they don’t have to peak until December and therefore don’t have to show all their cards. (But) not everybody is Ohio State, so the fact these other teams in the SEC where everyone is the same and losing games, they can’t afford to stay in third gear like Ohio State has been.”

But the margins are smaller than ever.

Teams have less depth than before. The path through the playoff is now perilous for the top seeds. Consider the 12-team playoff debut last season: None of the top four seeds — all conference champions — made the semifinals, and the title game came down to No. 7 Notre Dame versus No. 8 Ohio State.

The only Power Four unbeaten team, top-seeded Oregon, got knocked out in the quarterfinals by an Ohio State team it beat earlier in the year. 

The last unbeaten national champion came in 2023 when Michigan raised a banner. Are we going to see an unbeaten national title winner again anytime soon? It seems unlikely in this era, where parity means a larger pool of Power Four teams are competitive from week to week

“If there ever is, I think that’s the best team of all time,” said one Power Four general manager.