Do NFL Kickers Score More Fantasy Points in Domes Than Outdoors?

If you are weighing two kickers and one of them plays indoors, the roof association is real and measurable: across 2,127 comparable NFL regular-season games through 2025, the two kickers in a dome or closed-roof game combined for 17.4 fantasy points per game versus 15.6 outdoors — an adjusted difference of +1.7 points with a 95% interval from +1.1 to +2.2 points (Holm-adjusted p < 0.001). That headline number is combined across both teams' kickers, so the per-kicker share of the gap is roughly half of it.

That scoring gap is built from two smaller edges that point the same way. Teams attempted more field goals indoors: 4.06 combined attempts per game in dome or closed-roof games versus 3.80 outdoors, an adjusted difference of +0.25 attempts (95% interval +0.09 to +0.42, Holm-adjusted p = 0.005). And the kicks that were attempted went in more often: accuracy averaged 85.7% indoors versus 84.2% outdoors, an adjusted difference of +2.1 percentage points (95% interval +0.3 to +3.9, Holm-adjusted p = 0.021). The accuracy model also controls for average field-goal distance, so the gap is not simply a story about shorter indoor kicks.

The accuracy edge is the weakest of the three findings. Its HC3 robust interval and Holm-adjusted p-value exclude zero, but the game-level bootstrap interval does not: the bootstrap 95% interval runs from -0.4 to +3.4 percentage points with a bootstrap p-value of 0.123. The attempts and scoring gaps hold up under both uncertainty methods. Treat the accuracy difference as suggestive rather than settled.

The sample behind these numbers is large and complete. The registered comparison covers 640 dome or closed-roof games and 1,487 outdoor or open-roof games through the 2025 season, with no rows excluded for missingness. Field-goal accuracy is undefined in the 27 comparable games where neither team attempted a field goal, so its denominators are 633 condition games and 1,467 control games. The attempts and fantasy-point outcomes use the full 2,127-game sample. The scoring model adjusts for week and season; the accuracy model adds average kick distance on top of those.

Two boundaries matter for how you use this. First, these are retrospective associations from observed game conditions, not causal proof — teams that play in domes may differ from outdoor teams in ways that confound the comparison, and the study cannot separate the roof itself from franchise composition. Second, the roof status here is what was recorded after the fact; it is not a pregame forecast input, and this study does not show that forecasting a closed roof improves projections. The broad venue classification also cannot tell you what happens when a retractable roof is opened versus closed on the same day.

What the evidence supports: across three preregistered outcomes, every adjusted difference favors the indoor environment, and the attempts and scoring gaps are robust under both the HC3 robust intervals and the Holm-adjusted p-values. The accuracy gap clears that bar only on the robust interval and Holm p-value, not the bootstrap. For fantasy purposes, the practical takeaway is that a dome or closed-roof game has historically come with roughly 1.7 more combined kicker fantasy points per game, driven mainly by more attempts and, more tentatively, better accuracy.