September 2026 · Weather Records

The Games Weather Hit Hardest

Rain hurts passing. Wind hurts passing. Snow hurts passing. (Our research post has the real numbers.) So what happens when a game gets a little of everything at once? We added it all up. "Impact" is our estimate of how many passing yards an offense lost to the rain, snow and wind combined, using rates we actually measured, not a gut feeling. These are the five games the weather beat up the most.

The short version: the worst game we've tracked cost an offense an estimated 274.5 passing yards to rain and wind. That's like deleting a whole good passing game. It's also nearly triple our first estimate of the worst game on record, because we found and fixed a bug in how weather was measured across the whole site (story in the research post). Turns out rain's real effect on passing is way bigger than we first thought.

Highest impact on record274.5 yd

Games we can estimate impact for17,483

Yards lost per inch of rain~61

Yards lost per inch of snow~115*

Huge dark storm clouds loom over Ohio Stadium during a game, with the stands in shadow. — A rainstorm rolls over Ohio Stadium in September 2016. According to the photographer, it caused an hour-long rain delay shortly after this. Photo: Pi.1415926535, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The 5 highest-impact kickoffs on record

Estimated passing yards lost to that game's rain, snow and wind together, using the per-inch and per-mph rates from our weather research. Games under a roof don't count, since the weather never reached the field.

Date	Matchup	Score	Impact	Conditions
Sep 9, 2023	Purdue @ Virginia Tech	24–17	274.5 yd	4.31in rain, 11.3mph wind
Nov 12, 2011	Wyoming @ Air Force	25–17	252.1 yd	3.42in rain, 41.9mph wind
Oct 8, 2016	Notre Dame @ NC State	3–10	248.9 yd	3.67in rain, 24.3mph wind
Sep 8, 2018	Indiana State @ Louisville	7–31	168.8 yd	2.43in rain, 19.6mph wind
Sep 3, 2026	UAlbany @ Buffalo	17–21	162.2 yd	2.43in rain, 13.7mph wind

The mistake that rewrote this list

This post used to be about a different bug: weather readings sneaking into dome games. That fix is still in place, and dome games still get zero weather impact. But then we found something much bigger. Every weather reading on the site, back to 2005, had been grabbed for the wrong few hours (a timezone mix-up; full story here). Measured at the right time, rain turns out to hurt passing about three times as much as we first thought. That's why every game on this list, including the new #1, is a rain game instead of a snow game.

One asterisk (literally, it's marked in the table): snow's number is a rough guess for now. With the corrected data, only 8 games had real snow falling during the game, down from 69 under the old bug. Eight games is not a lot to learn from, so we'll trust that number more once more snow games pile up.

And remember: these are the games where conditions were worst, not proof that the weather explains everything that happened. Notre Dame's 3 points against NC State in pouring rain and 24 mph wind is a good example. The conditions were brutal. But also, Notre Dame just had a historically bad day on offense.

See the full top 50 on the Rankings page, or check this week's forecast for the estimated weather impact on upcoming games.