PUBLISHED RESEARCH / 19
Methods, sources, review records, and reproducibility files for every published article.
Do not rewrite your wide receiver rankings after Week 1. Once you have two games of target-share data, give the current role more weight than last season's role while still accounting for preseason expectations and team context.
Kicker scoring drops as soon as observed game wind passes 10 mph, and the damage grows with every threshold — but the evidence is retrospective, not a forecast.
A same-stadium comparison of 333 retractable-roof games through 2025 finds no reliable scoring or passing shift when the roof is open — but kickers made field goals at a meaningfully higher clip.
No. Dome and closed-roof games average more combined points than outdoor games in raw terms (48.3 vs 44.8), but after controlling for the home and away teams, week, and season, the adjusted difference is -2.1 points with a 95% interval from -5.7 to +1.5 and a Holm-adjusted p-value of 0.318.
Rain games show a real drop in completion rate and a smaller, less certain shift away from early-down passing — but no evidence of shorter targets or added turnovers.
Fourth Down Labs keeps two kinds of NFL weather evidence — what actually happened and what was forecast before kickoff — and only one of them can ever touch a projection.
Waiting until 6 hours before kickoff gets you a measurably better temperature and wind forecast than the day-before call. The rain call improves slightly too, but that improvement is not statistically distinguishable from no change.
The windy-game volatility myth does not survive the numbers: no position group shows a statistically reliable widening of scoring spread in 15+ mph wind games.
Dome and closed-roof games show more field-goal attempts, better accuracy, and higher combined kicker scoring than outdoor games — a retrospective association through the 2025 season.
Wind games look different by position, but only two groups show a supported scoring gap after adjustment.
Four familiar weather questions, four samples too small to answer confidently — and what the descriptive numbers do (and don't) say for fantasy managers.
Yes. Adding six-hour stadium weather forecasts reduced held-out weekly PPR projection error by 0.568% overall (95% game-cluster bootstrap interval: +0.328% to +0.810%), winning all six future-season windows from 2019 through 2024.
Wind doesn't stop NFL offenses from throwing deep — it makes the deep throws they attempt less efficient.
After adjusting for kick distance and season across 8,241 regular-season attempts, Allegiant Stadium leads on makes above expectation and FirstEnergy Stadium trails — but no stadium survives strict multiplicity correction.
At the registered 15 mph threshold, outdoor NFL games showed meaningfully less passing and scoring: neutral early-down dropback rate fell 1.8 points, completion rate fell 2.3 points, pass EPA per dropback dropped 0.067, and combined points fell 3.8 versus games below 10 mph.
Only 38.2% of first-round wide receivers delivered a top-36 PPR finish as rookies; the rate fell to 17.9% in Round 2 and 1.5% on Day 3.
By the end of Year 2, 54.5% of Round 1 wide receivers had produced a top-36 PPR season, versus 31.3% in Round 2, 17.2% in Round 3, and 4.6% on Day 3.
NFL Draft capital is a strong prior: 65.5% of Round 1 receivers reached a top-36 fantasy season by Year 3, compared with 6.2% on Day 3.
Expected touchdowns cut next-season forecast error by 11.7%, but they remain a tiebreaker—not a complete projection.