NFL field goal accuracy in wind and cold

Across 11,697 outdoor attempts by 313 kickers from 2008 to 2025, accuracy falls about 0.32 percentage points for every extra mile per hour of wind. Attempts in 10–14 mph wind convert 2.5 points below calm conditions (t = -3.20) and 15–19 mph wind costs 3.4 points (t = -2.35). Cold matters too, but less: 32–49°F runs 1.7 points below mild weather. Both effects are real, and both are smaller than the yardage on the kick.

"Expected" is the make rate for attempts of the same length, in the same season, in outdoor stadiums. The "vs calm" column is the cleaner comparison of the two: it sets each windy band against sub-10 mph attempts directly, so the mild positive that calm games carry by construction cannot flatter it. Anything with a t statistic under roughly 2 is noise and is greyed out. The 40-attempt minimum was fixed before any band was inspected and is applied to every study we publish.

One honest caveat on the dry-only column: stripping wet games out leaves the strong and gale bands with too little left to separate from noise, so those cells are direction only. The moderate band keeps its loss with rain removed, which is the result that matters — wind is doing the work, not the rain that often accompanies it.

Distance dominates everything. Inside 40 yards an NFL kick converts at 95.3% and barely moves with the weather; from 40–49 it is 78.8% and from 50+ it is 66.0%. The wind sensitivity follows the same shape: the 40–49 yard band loses the most accuracy per mile per hour (-0.5 points), because those kicks are already marginal enough for a few feet of drift to decide them.

The indoor column is a genuine weather-free control: 5,456 attempts in domes and closed roofs, converting at 87.2% overall against 86.0% outdoors. Indoor kicks are never used as the baseline for an outdoor band — the two are kept in separate expectation cells so a dome-heavy kicker's easy attempts cannot become the yardstick for someone kicking in December wind.

Cold is the condition most often blamed for a missed kick and the one least supported by the data here. Freezing games run 2.2 points below mild weather on 657 attempts (t = -1.64), which is the direction folklore expects but does not clear our threshold. The broader cold band does clear it, at 1.7 points. Note that cold games are also windier on average, so part of what looks like a temperature effect is the wind arriving with it.

Outdoor kicking has improved sharply across this window: attempts converted at 90.9% in 2008 and 87.3% in 2025. A study that pooled eighteen seasons against a single average would hand weather the credit for better kickers, better technique and better holders. Because each expectation cell is built inside a single season for a single five-yard distance band, that drift cannot reach the weather comparison.

• Wind is the kicking condition that matters. Both the 10–14 and 15–19 mph bands convert significantly below calm, and the loss scales with wind speed.
• Cold is the smaller story. A real but modest loss in the 32–49°F band; below freezing points the same way without clearing significance.
• Short kicks stay short kicks. Inside 40 yards, accuracy barely moves until the wind is genuinely strong. The mid-range kick is where weather decides outcomes.
• Rain is not doing the work. The moderate wind band keeps its loss with wet games removed entirely.

• Sample: 11,697 outdoor field-goal attempts, 2008–2025, with 5,456 indoor attempts held separately as a weather-free control. Attempts are parsed from public play-by-play, so misses carry their true distance rather than being inferred from a box-score total. 2007 and earlier are excluded: no play-level feed exists for 2006, and the 2007 feed records scoring plays only, so its misses are missing entirely. Seasons are admitted only when they carry a full year of attempts and a realistic share of misses, which also keeps an in-progress season out.
• Expectation: the leave-one-out make rate for attempts in the same season, the same five-yard distance cell and the same venue type. Cells with fewer than ten attempts are dropped rather than trusted.
• Weather: hourly reanalysis at the stadium's own coordinates, wind and temperature taken at kickoff, rainfall summed across the kickoff window for the dry-only split.
• Kicker mix: repeating the band comparisons with each kicker's own season deviation removed changes the band-to-band gaps by under half a point, so the wind result is not an artefact of which kickers happened to kick in wind. About 5% of older attempts carry no readable kicker name and are excluded from that check only.
• Not controlled: wind direction relative to the posts — the historical archive holds no reliable NFL field bearing, so crosswinds and tailwinds are pooled. Also not controlled: altitude, stadium-specific swirl, holder and snapper quality, and whether a coach declined a marginal attempt because of the conditions. That last one biases against finding an effect, since the hardest weather kicks are the ones least likely to be attempted.
• No kicker prop or alternate lines are attached to these attempts, so this study reports conversion against a distance-and-era expectation and makes no claim about whether the market prices wind correctly.

Data generated 2026-09-23. Numbers refresh as the archive tops up; corrections are dated and kept visible.

A summary card of the headline numbers, free to republish with a visible credit and a link back to this page.

• NFL Wind & Totals Study — how far wind bands cut the final score.
• NFL QB Passing in Wind — the passing side of the same conditions.
• College Football Wind, Scoring & Kicking — the same question one level down, where kickers are far less reliable.

• Open-Meteo ERA5 historical reanalysis — archive-api.open-meteo.com (hourly game-window weather at each venue’s own coordinates)
• ESPN NFL scores and odds — espn.com/nfl (schedules, final scores and consensus closing totals)
• Internal NFL historical game archive — venue identity, roof status and final scores.
• Internal NFL field-goal attempt archive — every attempt parsed from public play-by-play, makes and misses alike.
• Every dated change we have made to a published study is listed on our corrections log.