They rut the same every year. It's just a matter of whether they do it at night or not. If you are seeing less scrapes and rubs on a particular year, I would bet that the competition is lower. If a buck knows he won't have too much competition, he's less likely to scrape and rub.

Last year we say NO rut activity at all in WV...EXCEPT in the lights of the truck. LOL

We had 2 bucks mount does after dark in the light of our feeder in the front yard.

I personally think the weather plays a huge roll in the time (day or night) of the rut. I haven't seen too much rutting activity when the temps are high like last fall was. We still have oodles of fawns running around this year, so somebody was ruttin somewhere...