This was supposed to be a year where FCS felt as wide open as it has in some time, but this season already has a familiar feel to it.

North Dakota State goes on the road to Delaware this weekend. Both teams are ranked in the STATS FCS Top 25: the Bison are atop the poll yet again, while Delaware sits eighteenth. This should be one of the marquee matchups of the week, if not the non-conference schedule in FCS this season.

Unfortunately, it’s not expected to be all that close. A largely healthy NDSU going on the road to a Delaware team that has been turnover-prone on offense and is inexperienced on defense is a recipe for disaster for the home team. Two rating systems once used as part of the Bowl Championship Series – Jeff Sagarin’s ratings and Kenneth Massey’s ratings – both view NDSU as a prohibitive favorite. Sagarin projects a win of 18 to 22 points for NDSU; Massey projects a 37-10 final score, going so far as to give Delaware just a five percent chance to win at home.

Obviously, these numbers are only an educated guess at what will happen. Delaware could defy all the odds and come away with what would be a huge win for Danny Rocco’s program. But the fact that the probabilities are stacked so resoundingly against the 18th-best team in FCS football hosting the top team reflects the disparity that exists in FCS football. There is a clear gap between the elite handful of teams at the top of the subdivision and the rest of the teams that are highly competitive against each other, and even against FBS “Group of Five” schools. (Delaware, for instance, is ranked ahead of 18 FBS teams in the Sagarin ratings, which assesses all 256 Division I football teams in a single grouping across both classifications.) There are very few teams that the metrics view as serious threats to NDSU, and only slightly more who can threaten SDSU, Eastern Washington, or James Madison, the other consensus championship contenders this year.

If all those names look familiar, that shouldn’t come as a shock.

While expectations were this would be the year more contenders would emerge for the national championship, that hasn’t quite gone to plan so far. The Southern Conference has already seen a shocking loss from perennial favorite Wofford as the Terriers retool their offense; Jacksonville State quite possibly blew its chances at a seed in the playoffs by getting routed in the opener at Southeastern Louisiana; UC Davis, a high-powered offensive team coming to the Fargodome next week, had to make a goal-line stand on the final play to beat non-scholarship San Diego, a team that’s normally the bane of middle-of-the-pack Big Sky teams rather than contenders. In a year where the hope was to see fresh faces as the Bison turn over a big senior class, James Madison breaks in a new head coach, and South Dakota State breaks in a new quarterback, it seems like the usual suspects are rising to the top even earlier this year.

This is nothing new to the sport, of course. One need only look to the highest level of college football to see a similar dynamic playing out. Even the most rudimentary grasp of the college football landscape would land someone a 50% success rate in guessing the College Football Playoff teams. Alabama and Clemson feel like formalities even this early in the season; the latter stymied then-12th ranked Texas A&M last week before giving up an ultimately inconsequential touchdown in the final seconds. The disparity between the top six or so teams in FBS and teams seven through 30 is substantial, and it’s growing the longer coaches like Dabo Swinney and Nick Saban stay where they are. Normally, these sorts of dynastic runs only last for a coach or two before a team flush with cash hits a home run on a head coach and comes back in from the proverbial wilderness (i.e. Texas, USC).

In FCS, the dynamic is a bit different. The resource gaps are much more pronounced between the top and the middle, and the ability to maintain coaching staffs and string together successively stronger recruiting classes over time lets schools build up a significant advantage on the field. NDSU, for instance, has now been able to maintain continuity during two coaching transitions, holding excellent recruiting classes largely intact. High-end classes – including prospects NDSU has beaten out Group of Five and even the occasional Power Five team for – have now been assembled by all three head coaches in the Division I era with a strong first year on the trail for Matt Entz. That’s because NDSU has superb resources compared to the overwhelming majority of FCS teams, allowing Entz and his staff not only to dip into Florida or open new pipelines into Texas, but to maintain stronger ties with coaches and prospects in those areas, increasing the likelihood of three-star talents finding their way to Fargo.

Those resource gaps are widening; North Dakota State’s fundraising haul has nearly doubled since 2014 to greater than $6.7 million, and South Dakota State and Montana State have seen contributions skyrocket as well. Meanwhile, Delaware and Southern Illinois – programs with strong competitive histories that have won national championships in FCS – have seen fundraising sharply decline, in excess of 50% since 2014 in UD’s case. That makes it tougher to travel significant distances for recruiting, invest in top-of-the-line support facilities and commit money to retaining staff and fostering a culture of stability around a program. While CAA schools tend to have larger budgets than Missouri Valley or Big Sky schools, they also tend to field more sports and must accommodate cost of living in places like Baltimore and Philadelphia, meaning their money doesn’t always go as far as it does when NDSU, SDSU and other schools in the heartland see revenues soaring on the backs of sustained success.

This is not an inherently bad thing; after all, the widening gap between elite teams and the second tier has created a much greater parity among those second-tier teams, and college sports, in particular, seem to do better when there are a few elite “blue blood” brands that garner consistent recognition atop the polls and trophy counts. What it does mean, though, is that programs capable of hiring and retaining good coaches who recruit and develop well will excel consistently against their peers. That could lead to a larger number of games that seem intriguing on paper but could end in anticlimax.