[Goose]

The way to do this is with Z-scores (which normalize things to number of standard deviations away from the mean) by year, but compiling that data with college stats would probably be a royal pain. With cfbstats it would be easy, but of course that only goes back to 2008.

I also think that that normalization only works if the distributions are the same (like both Gaussian). I would strongly suspect that over a 46 year period, the points per game distribution in 2017 would have a much different shape than the one in 1971. As you say though, even determining that would be tons of work.

[Goose]

The way to do this is with Z-scores (which normalize things to number of standard deviations away from the mean) by year, but compiling that data with college stats would probably be a royal pain. With cfbstats it would be easy, but of course that only goes back to 2008.

I also think that that normalization only works if the distributions are the same (like both Gaussian). I would strongly suspect that over a 46 year period, the points per game distribution in 2017 would have a much different shape than the one in 1971. As you say though, even determining that would be tons of work.