The "mean" from the 80s was entirely different from what it is today (I know because I lived through it)....the winters were orders of magnitude colder back then (by a lot), even though it didn't snow much that decade either, the winters were at least 5 degrees colder.
This has been a crap pattern for snow not just for us but for large regions of the globe that expect snow, from the Great Lakes (outside of Buffalo) to most of Europe, with people suffering neck and back injuries and going to the ER because they were trying to "ski" on small scraps of snow in the Alps....it's been snowless in Germany, Austria and Switzerland too.
Looking at the whole globe you can see this is what to expect going forward with the changing climate.
Chris showed some graphs indicating the kind of blocking we had in 2010 and 2011 was something like a 1 in 500 year event?