NFL quarterback passing in wind

Across 4,555 outdoor starts by 107 quarterbacks from 2006 to 2025, passing output falls by about 1.62 yards for every extra mile per hour of wind. At 10–15 mph a starter throws -6.4 yards and -0.17 yards per attempt against his own season form, with completion rate -0.94 points lower — all three clear significance. Interceptions and sacks do not move. Wind makes passing less efficient; it does not make quarterbacks careless.

The top figure in each cell is the raw band average; the smaller figure is the gap against the quarterback's own season baseline, with its t statistic. Anything under roughly 2 is noise and is greyed out. The 40-start minimum was fixed before any band was inspected and is applied to every study we publish; the dry-only column falls below it in the strong and gale bands, so those cells are direction only.

Two honest caveats. First, the calm row is positive by construction — a quarterback's baseline includes his own windy starts, so the calm and windy rows are mirrors of each other, not independent results. Second, the 15–20 mph band is weaker than the 10–15 band on yardage (t = -1.38) despite the stronger wind. With 246 starts that is a sample-size artefact rather than a finding, and we are not presenting it as one.

League passing has drifted upwards across the window: outdoor starters averaged 209.2 yards at 6.88 per attempt in 2006 and 214.6 yards at 7.11 per attempt in 2025. A study that pooled two decades against a single league average would hand weather the credit for rule changes and offensive evolution. Because each baseline is built inside a single season for a single quarterback, that drift cannot reach the wind comparison at all.

• Efficiency falls before volume does. Completion rate and yards per attempt move together in the moderate band, which is what you would expect if the ball is harder to place rather than harder to hold.
• Mistakes do not rise. Interceptions and sacks sit flat against baseline in every band, matching the turnover study.
• Rain is not doing the work. The moderate band keeps a significant yardage loss with wet games stripped out (-5.4 yards, t = -2.00 across 652 dry starts).
• Genuinely strong wind is a different game. The 20 mph+ band is the largest effect in any study we have run — and the one we are least willing to price, on 48 starts.

• Sample: 4,555 outdoor starts, 2006–2025. A start qualifies when the passer threw the most attempts for his team, attempted at least 10 passes, and logged at least 8 such games that season so his baseline is stable. Domes and closed roofs are excluded entirely rather than used as a control.
• Weather: hourly reanalysis at the stadium's own coordinates, wind taken at kickoff, rainfall summed across the three hours from kickoff for the dry-only split.
• Baseline: leave-one-out mean of the same quarterback's other qualifying starts in the same season, computed separately for yards, yards per attempt, completion rate, interceptions and sacks.
• Not controlled: opponent pass defence, game script and score differential, wind direction relative to the field, play-calling, and receiver availability. A team that abandons the pass in a gale shows up here as fewer yards, which is part of the effect we are measuring rather than a separate one.
• No prop or betting lines are attached to these starts, so this study reports performance against a quarterback's own form and makes no claim about whether the market prices wind correctly.

Data generated 2026-09-22. Numbers refresh as the archive tops up; corrections are dated and kept visible.

• NFL Wind & Totals Study — the team-level companion: how far wind bands cut the final score.
• NFL Turnovers in Bad Weather — why wet and windy football does not mean extra giveaways.
• NFL Temperature & Scoring — the deliberate null: cold weather is mostly a myth.

• 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 quarterback boxscore archive — per-start passing lines parsed from public boxscores.
• Every dated change we have made to a published study is listed on our corrections log.