The Windiest College Football Stadiums, Ranked by 10 Seasons of Kickoff Wind

Kickoff-hour wind for every outdoor home game from 2016 to 2025, from the hourly weather record at each stadium's own coordinates. Venues need at least 40 games to be ranked; indoor and closed-roof games are left out. That leaves 114 ranked venues out of the 122 in our records.

Northwestern's figures cover 2016–2023 at the old Ryan Field, before the rebuild. Stadiums with fewer than 40 games in our records are not ranked. Snapshot taken 9 October 2026; it does not update on its own. The 84 venues below 8.0 mph average are omitted to keep the table readable — the pattern continues smoothly down to BYU at 3.4 mph.

The five calmest outdoor venues with at least 40 games. Every stadium on this list sits west of the 100th meridian or on the Pacific coast — the same geography that keeps the Midwest windy keeps these campuses calm.

We grouped 7,249 outdoor games by kickoff wind and compared each group with calm games under 10 mph, adjusting every band against the scoring level of its own season. A result counts as real only when |t| is 1.96 or more.

The windy groups score less than calm games and the moderate and strong bands clear the significance bar. Against the closing total the gap shrinks: strong-wind games finished 1.2 points under the line on average (t = -1.19), with the under hitting 55.6% of graded games — arithmetically better than break-even, but not statistically confident, so we treat it as a lean, not a system. Full method in the college football wind and kicking study.

Each band is compared with how often kicks of the same distance usually go in the calm sample, so a band full of long tries doesn't look worse than it is. Bands below 40 attempts are flagged as too thin to call.

• The Midwest prairie corridor — DeKalb, Muncie, Bowling Green, Mount Pleasant and Ames sit on flat open land with nothing to slow the weather systems that ride across the plains from late October on.
• Lake-effect venues — Northwestern's old Ryan Field sat a few hundred metres from Lake Michigan with open shoreline exposure; Kinnick, Camp Randall and Memorial Stadium (Lincoln) sit on open ground exposed to northerly autumn winds.
• The dry, calm West — Provo, Logan, Reno, Salt Lake City and Pasadena sit behind mountain ranges that block the plains wind, which is why every calmest venue is west of the Rockies.

Our figures come from the weather record at each stadium's coordinates, not sensors in the bowl. Inside a stadium, the wind a kicker feels can be stronger or weaker than the reading and can swirl.

See kickoff wind for every FBS stadium on the college football weather page. For the pro rankings, see the windiest NFL stadiums and the windiest MLB ballparks.

Outdoor regular-season home games 2016–2025 from our college football history database: 7,249 games with a kickoff-hour wind reading at 122 venues, of which 114 have at least 40 games. Wind is the hourly 10-metre reading at each stadium's own coordinates at kickoff. Scoring comparisons use Welch's t-test against calm games, season-adjusted. By the OverUnderWeather Research Desk.