How Many Bidders Did Your Incumbent Actually Beat?
FAR 2.101 says full and open competition means all responsible sources are permitted to compete. Whether any of them did is a separate field in the award record, and almost nobody screens on it. We crossed the two on all 505 DoD contracts over $50M expiring between April 2027 and September 2028: 307 of them, holding $214.8 billion, reached the incumbent without a contested bid.
Every capture plan carries a number nobody writes down: how big a field the incumbent beat to win the work in the first place.
So we went looking for the field.
"How many companies actually bid against the incumbent you are about to challenge?"
The answer sits in the award record, in a box most pipeline screens never open. FAR 2.101 defines the phrase printed on the front of the thing: "Full and open competition, when used with respect to a contract action, means that all responsible sources are permitted to compete."
Permitted. How many turned up is a different field, number_of_offers_received, and FPDS keeps the two apart on purpose.
So we crossed them on every row of our own expiring board. Of the 505 DoD definitive contracts over $50M coming off period of performance between April 2027 and September 2028, 307 reached their incumbent without a contested bid, and those carry $214.8 billion of the $330.3 billion in play (chart below).
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