The NFL's Most Exciting Season Ever Is Also Its Most Boring

The NFL has never been more exciting to watch—so how come this is the most boring season ever?

You've felt it, right? How it seems like every game is up for grabs, all the way to the finish? How no lead ever feels safe?

You're not imagining it. 

According to SportsBusinessRadio.com, the average NFL game is being won by just 10.28 points this year, the smallest margin since 1970. We've also been treated to 14 overtime games through Week 9, the second-most in history. As a result, NFL football is the hottest thing on TV: The 12 highest-rated telecasts since the regular season kicked off have all been NFL games.

We've had more close shaves and fewer blowouts, more dramatic finishes and fewer snoozers. As a TV show, the NFL has never been better.

Butch Dill/Associated Press

But the NFL has also never been so boring.

There are a record three undefeated teams through nine weeks: The Cincinnati Bengals, Carolina Panthers and New England Patriots are all 8-0. Together with the Denver Broncos (7-1), Green Bay Packers (6-2) Minnesota Vikings (6-2) and Arizona Cardinals (6-2), they are the class of the NFL.

All four teams with five wins also have four losses, and a couple of the six four-win teams are below .500 with five losses. These teams may be in position for a wild-card spot or even their division championship, but they're clearly trailing the top group.

Then, there's everyone else.

Going into Week 10, a whopping 14 teams are stuck with just three wins or fewer; their seasons should be all but over. Again, thanks to the poor records in the AFC South and NFC East, some of the three-win teams still technically have postseason life—but a 3-5 team such as the Houston Texans can't truly be considered a contender.

The NFL, a league where parity has been a vital part of the league's success in recent decades, suddenly feels like baseball or basketball, where a handful of teams are truly competing for a title, and everyone else is just watching.

What's going on this season?

Jeff Haynes/Associated Press

First, we know from the average margin of victory that games are closer than they've been since before the AFL/NFL merger. Yet, teams are averaging 23.5 points per game and 5.6 yards per play so far this year—both tops most in NFL history, per Pro Football Reference.

Meanwhile, in 1970, teams averaged just 19.2 points per game and 4.6 yards per play, each the seventh-lowest league-wide offensive averages of the postwar era. 

It makes sense: Games finish closest when everyone is scoring like crazy, or nobody is scoring at all. In this age of bonkers offenses, it's harder for the leader to pull far ahead and easier for a trailing team to make it close again late.

This scoring volatility is wreaking havoc with what's normally one of the best predictors of NFL team strength: scoring differential.

The difference between how many points a team scores and how many it allows is a reliable predictor of team strength. The Simple Rating System, one of the strongest predictive metrics we have, is essentially just adjusting margin of victory by strength of schedule. But the link between margin of victory and results is the weakest it's been since 2004.

Year	DVOA Avg. Var
2015	11.87
2014	15.67
2013	12.17
2012	13.65
2011	14.07
2010	17.00
2009	15.70
2008	16.26
2007	15.87
2006	14.71
2005	16.12

Using Pro Football Reference, I found the correlation between margin of victory and win percentage for 2015, and each of the 10 years prior. Not only is the 2015 correlation of 0.892 lower than any of the 10 previous years, but it's well below the 0.923 average over that period. This isn't a huge difference, of course, but we're talking about the correlation between scoring and winning.

This implies that with games so close, Lady Luck is having a slightly stronger say in the win-loss column than she usually does. 

But more in-game volatility should lead to a wilder season, shouldn't it? Not necessarily. In fact, per Football Outsiders' DVOA, NFL teams are performing more consistently than they have in a decade.

DVOA is the best one-number metric of overall team efficiency, and the "D" part, "defense-adjusted," allows analysts not only to compensate for strength of opponent but also isolate how strong a team plays from week to week. So far in 2015, league-wide average variance is 11.9 percent—lower than any of the 10 preceding seasons and well below the league-wide average of 15.1 percent over that period.

The end result? With strong week-to-week consistency across the league and a lot of close, high-scoring games being played, the strongest six or seven teams are pulling out win after win—and it's almost impossible to separate everyone else.

Of course, we're only halfway through the season, and all of these trends could change. But whether they do or don't, the results in the books are in the books. It would take an awful lot of variance, luck and plain old regression for any of the NFL's middling teams to knock the Pats, Bengals or Panthers off their perch.