Short answer to a long title: yes! The Super Bowl is, on average, less exciting than a regular season game, although that partially depends on how you define “interesting” or “exciting.”

By my count, Sunday’s Super Bowl XLVI will be the 10,413th NFL game played in the Super Bowl era, which started in 1967. Actually, it’s not by my count — it’s by Pro Football Reference’s count. The average margin of victory (MoV) across all of those games is 12.0 points. For regular season games (all 9,983 of them), average MoV is 11.9. For non-Super Bowl playoff games (385*), average MoV is 13.2. And, for Super Bowls (44), the average MoV is 14.3.

So, if you define “exciting” as a “close game”, then the Super Bowl is less exciting, right? Yes, but let’s check one more thing. Average MoV only tells you so much. What you’re really concerned with is the percentage of games that are close. Averages can get skewed by monstrous blowouts, such as the 49ers 55-10 drubbing of the Denver Broncos in 1990.

Here, by game type, is the percent of games (y axis) that are decided by a margin of victory less than or equal to the value on the x axis:

% of Games Decided by a Margin of At Least X

This chart shows us that the Super Bowl is consistently less close than the Regular Season for any margin of victory. At this point, we can safely conclude that based on margin of victory, at least,  the Super Bowl is less exciting than the regular season.

What about another metric: total points scored? Close games are nice, but an occasional shootout — even if it ends with a wide spread — can be fun, too. Here we do see a reason that Super Bowls might be more exciting: regular season games have an average point total of 41.1 points, the playoffs 42.5 points, and the Super Bowl 45.8 points. So is it safe to say that the Super Bowl shows off some more exciting offensive firepower?

Well, yes and no. Remember that part of what gets a team to the Super Bowl is its explosive offense and/or bone-crushing defense. A more interesting question, I think, is whether Super Bowl participants score more (perhaps because the game is sloppier, or played in a higher-risk fashion) or less (because they’re playing a generally outstanding defense) than they do in the regular season. Answer: eventual Super Bowl participants scored 27.2 points per game in the regular season, yet scored only 22.9 points per game in the Super Bowl itself. Guess those defenses do make a difference.

So, while the Super Bowl has more points than an average regular season game, it actually has fewer points than a regular season game featuring an eventual Super Bowl team. That’s not too surprising, of course, because certain unnamed teams (cough, St. Louis and Cleveland, cough) have bumbling offenses that score few points, and Keystone Kop defenses that let Super Bowl contenders ring up the TDs. Here are some average points per game statistics to munch on:

So why watch the Super Bowl at all? For the ads, of course. Enjoy the game… and go Steelers! Next year, that is.

* Yes, it’s strange that this is an odd number. In the 1968 season, the Raiders and Chiefs tied for the AFL Western Division, resulting in a one-game playoff. The NFL’s current tiebreak rules prevent this from ever happening again.