College Football Climatology Posted on September 9, 2013
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College Football Climatology Posted on September 9, 2013 Michigan kicks an extra point in a 1950 game against Ohio State that was played in a snowstorm. The game essentially decided the Big Ten championship, and Michigan won 9-3 in what is known as “The Snow Bowl”. Squarely at the intersection of two of my interests are football games that are played during adverse weather conditions. There’s something special about seeing two teams battle it out in the elements that can make a great game legendary. The Ice Bowl. The Fog Bowl. The Snow Bowl. The “Tuck Rule” game. These games stand out in football history and memories usually due to a combination of the weather and implications for championships. Many of these examples come from the National Football League. As a fan of the Green Bay Packers I have been well-schooled on the lore of the 1967 NFL Championship Game, otherwise known as the “Ice Bowl”. The game was played during bitterly cold conditions with wind chills around -35 degrees (using the new version of the wind chill formula). The Packers, down by 3 points to the Dallas Cowboys, had just over four minutes to drive 68 yards for the winning score and a berth in the second Super Bowl. It says a lot that most people remember this game more than Super Bowl II itself! Of course, the Packers completed the final drive with Bart Starr diving into the end zone on a quarterback sneak with just seconds remaining on the game clock. There are also plenty of examples from college football. The picture at the beginning of this article was taken during the 1950 installment of the Ohio State vs. Michigan rivalry game with a Big Ten championship on the line. It was a late November game, played during a snowstorm, that featured very little scoring and 45 punts. Columbus, Ohio recorded 7.5 inches of snow for the day, with a high temperature of only 20 degrees – still the coldest maximum temperature for that date. Of course I could go ahead and list or rank many of the “worst weather football games”. I’ve already briefly discussed two that stand out in the professional and college ranks. That concept had interested me originally, but many have already done that and the process would be quite subjective. I prefer numbers, and so I’ve decided to approach weather and football from a statistical and climatological perspective. With the new college football season beginning around the time I started this project, I decided to develop a climatology for locations where teams from the Football Bowl Subdivision play. The football conferences have been in a state of flux recently, and there are a number of teams from the lower division (Football Championship Subdivision, FCS) completing their transition to FBS in the next few years. These include: South Alabama, Texas State, UT-San Antonio, Massachusetts, Georgia State, UNC-Charlotte, Old Dominion, Appalachian State and Georgia Southern. For purposes of creating a complete climatology, I have included all of these teams regardless of whether or not they are currently considered full members of the FBS. The details are all below. One hundred and twenty four stadium locations are included in the climatology. I looked at a total of 129 teams, but five of them regularly play their home games indoors. This includes Syracuse in the Carrier Dome, Tulane in the Superdome, and Idaho in the Kibbie Dome. Relatively new arrivals to the FBS – University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) and Georgia State – also play indoors at the Alamodome and Georgia Dome respectively. When compiling data for the climatology, I considered averages and normals from the 1981-2010 period which is the standard in the US now. I only considered data for years in which the entries were complete. Although there are some games every year very late in August or in the first week of December, I only used data from September to November as that is the core of the college football season and will be most representative. Obviously there are few climate locations situated directly on a college campus, so I simply used the closest station with complete records that I could find. In most cases there was an official observing station or cooperative observer in or near the same city in which a team plays its games. The greatest gap between a stadium and observing station that I used was roughly 15 miles between Miami’s (OH) Yager Stadium in Oxford, Ohio and a cooperative observer in Brookville, Indiana. Snow blankets the University of Wyoming campus at Laramie, Wyoming. Picture from “Wyoming Jackrabbit” on Flickr. Situated nearly a mile and a half (7165 feet) above sea level amongst mountain ranges is Laramie, Wyoming, home of the University of Wyoming. It was settled in the mid-19th century along the Union Pacific railroad, and the university followed shortly thereafter in 1886. War Memorial Stadium, home of the Wyoming Cowboys, has the distinction of being the highest elevation stadium in the Football Bowl Subdivision. With that in mind, it’s not too surprising that the Cowboys ended up with the coldest stadium location by average temperature by a considerable margin. Laramie came in with an average September-November temperature of 41.5 degrees, followed at some distance by Pullman, WA and Washington State University at 47.6 degrees. It also was well clear in first place for the most number of sub-freezing days (in which the temperature did not exceed 32°F) at 9.2 on average. Roughly 8 of those came in the month of November, meaning that around 1 out of every 4 November days had a high temperature of 32 degrees or colder. As you can see from the rankings above, no matter which measure you choose Laramie comes out on top as college football’s coldest spot. Average temperature is merely a simple average of the high and low temperatures on a given day. I also ranked the various stadium locations by average maximum temperature, as many of the games are played at some point during the afternoon hours, which is when the warmest conditions usually are. I didn’t consider minimum temperatures because they often occur very late at night, or close to sunrise, when football games are not played. Therefore, it could be argued that the average maximum temperature would be the most representative measure of coldest college football locations. Either way, it makes no difference to which stadium ends up in first place, and very little difference to the top five – the same stadiums are in slightly different order. So the five coldest college football locations can likely be considered to be a combination of Wyoming, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Washington State, and Central Michigan. Minnesota makes the list having just recently switched from a domed to outdoor stadium in 2009. The change makes the Minnesota-Wisconsin rivalry game one of the coldest on average in the FBS. The Gophers and Badgers have been battling it out for the Paul Bunyan Axe since 1948, and have been contesting the rivalry game since 1890. 11 of the last 18 games (1995-2012) have been played in November, but only 1 of the last 4. The Mid-American Conference (MAC) and the Big Ten Conference are neck-and- neck for the “coldest conference”. Both conferences feature teams that are tightly clustered geographically around the Great Lakes and Upper Midwest regions. In fact, their geographical footprint overlaps considerably which is why their averages are so close. By both average temperature and maximum temperature, the MAC (52.1°F, 62.0°F respectively) just barely edges out the Big Ten (52.2°F, 62.3°F). Iowa and Wisconsin play football on November 7, 1925 as snow falls around them in Iowa City. Cooperative observer records show 5 inches of snow fell that day in Iowa City. Image from the Iowa Digital Library on Flickr. College football games played in the snow are relatively rare. This is due in large part to the fact that the majority of the college football season wraps up prior to Thanksgiving, well before the heart of the winter season arrives. As you look at graphs of normal snowfall at various locations, it quickly becomes apparent that December, January, and February are usually snowier months than those months that feature the college football regular season. For example, take the Colorado Buffaloes who play their games in Boulder, Colorado. Boulder averages 20.8 inches of snow from September to November, the highest total amongst FBS programs. Despite that, there has only been snow throughout a Colorado home football game on six occasions since 1949, according to their Sports Info Director David Plati. It makes sense when you figure that Boulder only averages 7.2 days with measurable snow during the season and that there are only around 6 home games per year. Even if measurable snow occurs on a game day, the snow could actually accumulate well before or after the game is played. Because snowy college football games are a rare commodity, be sure to watch the ones that you can. These sort of games are most likely at Wyoming and Colorado, which lead the way in average number of days with measurable snow at 10 and 7.2 respectively. Other schools that average at least 5 days with measurable snow during the season are Colorado State (5.9), Air Force (5.9), Minnesota (5.8), Utah State (5.7), Buffalo (5.3), and Utah (5.1). Rain falls on Michigan Stadium, or ‘The Big House’, during a 2011 football game between Western Michigan and Michigan.