Does NFL Scoring Change With an Open vs. Closed Retractable Roof?

If you've been benching or starting skill players based on whether a retractable roof is open, the scoring data says don't bother: combined points and passing efficiency showed no reliable difference between open- and closed-roof games in the same stadiums. The one place the roof state did show up is the kicker's leg — field-goal accuracy was about 9.6 percentage points higher in open-roof games after adjustment, a difference that survived multiplicity correction.

The fantasy consequence here is mostly about restraint. Open-roof games averaged 49.1 combined points versus 48.8 with the roof closed — a raw gap of less than a third of a point. After controlling for week, season, stadium, and both teams, the adjusted change was +2.5 points with a 95% interval running from -3.5 to +8.4 and a Holm-adjusted p-value of 0.536. That interval is wide enough to include a modest boost or a modest dip, so there's no signal here to act on for team totals, overs, or stacking decisions.

Passing efficiency tells the same null story. Pass EPA per dropback — a per-play measure of how much expected points a pass adds, where zero is neutral — averaged 0.080 in open-roof games and 0.044 in closed-roof games. The adjusted change was +0.041 with a 95% interval from -0.031 to +0.113 and a Holm-adjusted p-value of 0.536. Quarterbacks and receivers were not reliably more or less productive with the roof open.

Kickers are where the comparison gets interesting. Field-goal accuracy averaged 92.4% in open-roof games versus 85.7% with the roof closed. After adjusting for week, season, stadium, both teams, and the average distance of field-goal attempts, the change was +9.6 percentage points with a 95% interval from +3.6 to +15.6 and a Holm-adjusted p-value of 0.007 — the only outcome in the family that cleared the corrected significance bar. Combined kicker fantasy points moved in the same direction: 18.7 in open-roof games versus 17.6 closed, an adjusted change of +3.0 points with a 95% interval from +0.5 to +5.5 and a Holm-adjusted p-value of 0.060. That kicker-points estimate sits just outside conventional significance after correction, so treat it as suggestive rather than settled.

Two caveats keep this honest. First, the open-roof sample is small: 41 open-roof games against 292 closed-roof games across 333 comparable games in retractable-roof stadiums that recorded both states, through the 2025 season. Wide intervals on the scoring and passing outcomes are partly a sample-size story. Second, these are retrospective associations from recorded roof states — the roof state is known after the fact, not something you can reliably project before kickoff, and this study does not show that a pregame forecast of roof state would improve your projections. It also does not establish that opening the roof causes anything; teams open roofs in specific conditions, and those conditions are part of the story.

The takeaway for fantasy decisions: don't adjust your expectations for quarterbacks, receivers, or game totals based on a retractable roof being open. The kicker result is real enough to notice — roughly ten percentage points of field-goal accuracy in the same stadiums — but with only 39 open-roof games contributing to that estimate and a Holm-adjusted p-value of 0.007, it's a historical pattern worth tracking, not a license to stream kickers off a roof-state guess.