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The original was posted on /r/nfl by /u/DiggingNoMore on 2024-07-01 14:00:03+00:00.
Since 1999 - as far back as my data goes - over 25,000 field goals have been attempted by 191 players. About 6% of the time, the kicker has been iced. For our purposes, I’m defining that as any field goal attempt that was immediately preceded by a timeout by the opposing team.1
I was curious how often icing the kicker actually works. In a simple table, broken down by distance, the numbers look like this:
| Distance | Not Iced FG Pct | Iced FG Pct |
|---|---|---|
| 0-19yds | 99.3 | 100 |
| 20-29yds | 96.6 | 94.6 |
| 30-39yds | 88.1 | 89.8 |
| 40-49yds | 74.5 | 70.6 |
| 50+yds | 61.3 | 54.6 |
That same data can be visualized in graph form here: . The first thing I noticed was that icing the kicker doesn’t make a whole lot of difference if the field goal is under 40 yards. The further the kick, the more it helps. To me, this means you should ice a kicker if the kick is 40 or more yards.
But then I thought it was theoretically possible that kickers years ago were more susceptible to getting iced and were dragging down the stats. After all, kickers are making field goals more often nowadays. So I broke it down by season. That looks like this: . The orange “not iced” line shows a fairly steady increase in successful field goal percentage. The blue “iced” line is more jagged, due to the smaller sample size, but notice how it’s also increasing, just not quite as steep as the “not iced” line. Kickers are getting harder to ice, but not as fast as they’re getting better at making kicks.
Going back to the first chart, it is clear that icing works much better after 40 yards. So I created the same kind of year-by-year chart as just above, but focused it only on the 40+ yard field goals. That looks like this: . The “not iced” and the “iced” linear trendlines are extremely close to parallel. So the kickers are getting better at not getting iced, but really only if the kick is 39 yards or closer. Once you get beyond 40, kickers haven’t become more resilient to icing over the last twenty years, relative to their typical kicking percent.
It was at this point that I thought, “Distance is great and all, but the other factor that seriously affects field goals is the wind speed.” This table breaks it down: . Wind doesn’t matter at all if the kick is under 20 yards, with a 100% make rate in almost every subcategory, iced or not (except 2 of the 298 field goal attempts from that distance that got blocked). But compare the two tables. They’re extremely similar, indicating that icing has very little effect when compared to how much the wind affects the kick. There is a large difference in make percentage between iced and not iced kickers attempting 50+ yard field goals when the wind is low, though. To me, this means that you should ice the kicker if the wind is below 8mph - beyond that, wind will wreak havoc more than your icing ever will. Except there’s also a big change in make percentage when icing in 20+mph wind, but, at this point, I’m assuming that’s due to the small sample size.
So when to ice the kicker? I’d break it down into this flowchart: . You don’t want to ice the kicker when the kick is under 40 yards (because the kick is easy and you’ll waste the timeout) or if the wind is 8mph or faster (because the kick is hard and you’ll waste the timeout), unless the game is about to end since you can’t take the timeout with you.
Join me next time for “Name and Shame: Which Kickers Are Easiest To Ice”.
- Yes, I’m aware that the Cowboys once iced their own kicker. There may be other cases. The problem is that the kicking team frequently calls a timeout before a field goal attempt in order to stop the clock. I have no way of differentiating the two, so self-ices are being ignored.