In recent weeks, the Pittsburgh Steelers have seen their playoff hopes take a hit as the Black-and-gold has stumbled in home matchups against some of the league’s weakest teams. With their current 7-6 record, the Steelers now join the league’s growing pack of mediocre teams which collectively have made football weekends far less intriguing these days.

At the same time as players continue getting bigger, stronger, faster and richer year by year, the quality of what NFL fans are witnessing on the field during the past several years has taken a nosedive. After Week 14 of the 2023 regular season, some key stats document this decline. For example, using a modest winning percentage of .600 as the threshold for a serious contender, 23 of the NFL’s 32 teams currently are performing below the line. So far this season, 16 teams representing half of the entire league have surrendered more points than they’ve scored, while three additional teams have scored an average of less than one point per game more than their opponents.

At the bottom of this collapsing NFL spectrum, five teams (including the Patriots and Cardinals) have surrendered more than 100 points this season greater than the number they’ve scored. In the log-jammed NFC South Division, not a single team currently has a winning percentage above .500.

Not surprisingly, the number of games in recent years which accurately can be described as unwatchable has increased significantly. Unfortunately, in recent seasons the Steelers have been key actors in a number of these tedious games. But even marquee matchups like those this past weekend between the Chiefs and Bills or Cowboys and Eagles were marred by pre-snap penalties, poor officiating and other gaffes of a nature one might not normally expect still to be occurring in December football.

The NFL which many fans watched in previous decades was characterized by several teams which remained competitive — even dominant — for multiple seasons. But today the NFL has morphed into a flash-in-the-pan league dominated by short-term considerations. Nowadays, if a team is floundering, the organization doesn’t need to wait until it navigates an arduous and unpredictable rebuilding process. The more rapid course to success today is by making a blockbuster deal, such as the Tampa Bay Bucs did when they signed Tom Brady in March 2020, or the L.A. Rams in signing Matthew Stafford a year later. The New York Jets followed suit in April of this year, only to see Aaron Rodgers knocked out for the season.

NFL franchises are perfectly willing to write huge checks in exchange for the instant credibility a top QB confers. The Cleveland Browns took a major financial hit when they acquired Deshaun Watson from the Houston Texans. But when Watson was lost to injury this season, they lured veteran Joe Flacco out of retirement despite the fact he had been the poster boy of the hated Ravens — the former Browns team which Art Modell kidnapped from Cleveland in 1996 and moved to Baltimore.

These are precisely the merry-go-round scenarios spawned by the league’s contemporary practices, as well as by the ever-present pressure to win. Presented with the choice between cultivating the sport’s integrity or its show-business aspects, the league office long ago placed its thumb upon the scale of the latter.

The parity which league policies intentionally foster seems to give just about every team these days a reasonable shot eventually to make a journey from rags to riches. But unfortunately, the road leading from the summit back down to mediocrity nowadays can be equally short, as the L.A. Rams and Tampa Bay Bucs discovered following their Super Bowl wins. As yet, though, the trend of increasingly unappealing football — heightened this season by a rash of injuries to the league’s marquee QBs — hasn’t significantly dented the NFL’s bottom line. As long as the NFL goose continues laying golden eggs, we probably should expect more of the same from the league.

If you’ve noticed the football you’re watching nowadays has been considerably less satisfying, it’s important to recognize this phenomenon not only is an issue for the Pittsburgh Steelers, but for the entire league. For example, a comparative analysis of the early part of the past several seasons conducted by pro football analyst Warren Sharp in mid-October (linked below) reported that, during Weeks 1-6 in the 2018 season, 328 passing touchdowns were scored in the NFL in 186 games. By contrast, through the first six weeks of the 2023 season, only 245 passing TDs were tallied in the same number of games — a reduction of 25%. During the 2020 regular season, there were 318 passing TDs in the first six weeks and 321 passing TDs during the same weeks in 2021. But in 2022, the total for Week 1-6 total dropped substantially to 257 passing TDs.

In 2018, the NFL recorded a total of 847 passing TDs. Projecting the average weekly number of passing TDs recorded through 14 weeks of the 2023 regular season to the end of this season, the result is 725 passing TDs or 122 fewer than pro football fans were celebrating five years ago. Apparently, the rule changes implemented by the NFL for the specific purpose of making the game more exciting haven’t yielded the desired results.

The following is a list compiled in an October article by Sharp Football Analysis, of the average combined points scored per game (i.e. by both teams) during the past 14 years in Weeks 1-6:

2010: 41.8
2011: 45.4
2012: 46.5
2013: 45.9
2014: 46.7
2015: 46.6
2016: 45.9
2017: 44.4
2018: 48.3
2019: 44.7
2020: 50.8
2021: 47.8
2022: 43.3
2023: 43.4

As the chart indicates, average combined points have declined by more than 7 points per game since 2020 and the numbers for 2022 and 2023 are lower than at anytime since 2010.

Overall, these stats impact fans’ experience and engagement with pro football. They also help to explain the disaffection many have expressed during recent seasons. Quite simply, NFL games aren’t as interesting as they’ve been in former years and we’re seeing substantially fewer of precisely the type of play (passing TDs) which generates the greatest fan excitement.

After another pair of dreadfully played Monday night games to close out Week 14 (featuring the Packers, Giants, Dolphins and Titans), it was beyond obvious that the NFL’s current product continues to provide less and less bang for the buck as time passes. Unfortunately, it hardly seems that we’ve yet seen the bottom of this trend.