11-17-2022, 01:10 PM
(11-16-2022, 02:33 PM)kevin Wrote: It may not be a factor Sunday, but some games it gets so cold the football turns into a frozen brick. Throwing it is hard as it just dies in mid air. Catching it is hard. You can forget about 50 yard field goals when the footballs are like a frozen brick. You better get a lot closer to try a field goal. The frozen brick effect on the football is one of the huge differences between warm weather teams and cold weather teams. I have seen the Bengals have to try to play with a frozen brick many times, and it does effect the game calling. However if most of this game is around 30, that is not like zero and the football should be not too bad.
Since 1999, field goals of 50 yards or more have a success rate of 56% when the temperature is above 30 degrees. When the temperature is less than 25 degrees, they have a success rate of 57%. The problem with going much lower than that is you just don't have any data to work with. For instance, you mentioned zero degrees. Since 1999, there has been precisely two games with temperatures of zero degrees or worse. These games were New York vs Green Bay in the NFC Championship during the 2007 season and the Wild Card round of 2015, Minnesota vs. Seattle. In these games, the collective kickers were converting 66% of their kicks. However, they only missed one attempt over 40 yards between them and zero attempts over 45 yards.
