Can Cold Weather Slow Elite Offenses?

In the early portions of most NFL seasons, there are teams that take the league by storm by putting up huge numbers offensively. From there, those teams usually go in one of two directions. Either they continue putting up big numbers en route to a strong showing in the playoffs, or their production fades over time and causes the team to fall short of their goal of winning a championship. But how much does cold weather play a role in the dropoff that teams might experience later in the season? The answer is that the weather can be a factor, but is never a sole reason for a team’s decline.

A great example of a team that saw its production drop from where it was during the warm weather portions of the season was the 2017 Kansas City Chiefs. The Chiefs won their first five games of the season and looked like a contender to win the Super Bowl for the majority of the year. Alex Smith was even being talked about as a candidate to win the league MVP award, which seems absurd in retrospect.

Andy Reid’s team lost six out of seven games after their 5-0 start, putting them in a position where they had to win their final four games to put themselves in a decent spot in the playoffs. With a home game to look forward to in the first round of the postseason, the Chiefs took a big lead before falling apart against the Tennessee Titans.

So what role did weather play in all of this? From the looks of things, not too much. The Chiefs scored 28 points or more in five of their final 13 games, putting up high point totals in nearly half of their games after they started to lose. Among those five games were wins in Denver in late October and New York near Thanksgiving, which is to say that they did fine in some less than stellar weather. In fact, a quick look at the split stats for the Chiefs on the 2017 season shows that December yielded their highest output of passing yardage by month on the season, when the weather is at its coldest.

Generally, it is more productive to look at the matchups that a team faces to determine the real cause of their issues. The Chiefs’ run of six losses in seven games featured four road losses, and home losses to playoff teams in the Steelers and Bills. Winning on the road is never easy in the NFL, and when you throw a tough schedule on top of it that only gets more challenging. Not to mention that coaching in the NFL tends to get more conservative in bad weather, which has less to do with the weather and more to do with the people in it.

So if a sports media type ever makes the argument that a team gets worse when the weather gets cold, remember that the cold can impact a team’s offensive output to an extent, but that there are countless other circumstances that should be considered first. Keeping this advice in mind can be a major factor in keeping your bankroll in your possession while building it up.