NFL wind and totals

Across 3,474 outdoor games from 2006 to 2025, wind does nothing to scoring until it reaches about 10 mph — and then it does a great deal. Games in the 10–15 mph band score -2.6 points against calm-weather games, and 15–20 mph gives up -4.0. The effect keeps widening above 20 mph, but that band is too small to quote precisely. Above 10 mph, each extra mile per hour is worth about 0.4 points off the total. Winning margins barely move, so this is points leaving the game rather than the contest tilting.

The smaller figure in each cell is the season-adjusted gap against the calm control, with its t statistic. Anything under roughly 2 is noise. Bands or sub-samples under 40 games are greyed out and flagged thin. The gale row's n=40 merely clears that pre-existing minimum; it is shown for direction only, not as a priceable signal.

Scoring and wind both drift from year to year, and the share of genuinely windy games is not constant either — it has run anywhere from under 2% of a season's outdoor games to nearly 16%. That is exactly why every comparison above measures a game against its own season rather than against the twenty-year pool.

• Under 10 mph is not a weather game. The 5–10 mph band scores the same as dead calm, and slightly better once you keep only the dry games. A forecast reading 8 mph is not information.
• 10 mph is where the effect starts. The 10–15 mph band is the most reliable finding in the study: a -2.6 point gap on 702 games, and still -2.3 once wet games are removed.
• It is wind, not rain in disguise. Holding the games dry, and then dry and above 40°F, keeps most of the loss intact in the moderate band and a reduced but still present loss in the strong band.
• The slope is roughly linear above 10 mph. About 0.4 points per extra mile per hour across 924 games — a simple, usable way to think about a forecast that reads 18 rather than 12.
• Margins do not move. Wind takes points off the board without making games closer, so it is a totals input, not a side input.

• Sample: 3,474 outdoor NFL games, 2006–2025, with resolved venue coordinates and a final score. Domes and closed roofs are excluded entirely rather than used as a control. 222 of them ran at 15 mph or more.
• Weather: hourly reanalysis at the stadium's own coordinates, read across the game window from kickoff rather than off a single snapshot. Rainfall is summed over the same window and temperature is taken at kickoff.
• Wind here is speed only. Direction relative to the stadium's orientation is not separated out in this study, so a crosswind and a straight-down-the-field wind of the same speed sit in the same band.
• Control group: under 5 mph. Every figure is season-adjusted — each game against its own season's average — and the dry and dry-and-mild columns repeat the comparison on the filtered sub-samples with their own controls.
• Not controlled: team quality, pass-run balance, gusts as distinct from sustained wind, playoff versus regular season intensity, and snow, which reanalysis reports as precipitation rather than separately.
• Closing lines are not attached to these games, so this study reports points, not Over/Under hit rates. We will not publish hit rates without the lines.

Data generated 2026-09-13. Numbers refresh as the archive tops up; corrections are dated and kept visible.