How Cold are Big Ten Football Games?
by Buck Bravo on Mar 29, 2010 6:54 AM CDT
in Gopher Football
29 comments
Big Ten football fans are used to hearing about cold weather. Television announcers and sports commentators often use words such as frigid, tundra, cold, and frozen as descriptive terms for Big Ten football. Even within the Big Ten, some fan bases will proclaim rival schools to be far colder than their own. While there is no doubt that Big Ten football will be played in cooler weather than most games in the SEC, claims that certain Big Ten stadiums will be drastically colder than others are extreme exaggerations at best.
Game day average temperatures for Big Ten home games were as follows for the 2009 season:
All teams in the Big Ten had average home game temperatures between 51 and 59 degrees. There was only an average difference of seven degrees between the coldest and warmest schools in the conference. Iowa and Minnesota often suffer the most damage from unfounded statements of weather defamation. Those schools were tied for the dubious title of coldest average temperature for Big Ten football games in 2009 but Michigan, Penn State and Illinois were all within one degree.
The words "freezing" and "frozen" were completely inappropriate for describing Big Ten football in 2009. Only one game was played in weather that was below the freezing point, and that game was played by Illinois on December 5th when most teams no longer had regular season games on the schedule.
Only 6 games out of 77 were played in weather below 40 degrees. There's a 92% chance that any given Big Ten game will be played in the 40s, 50s, 60s, or 70s. That's perfect football weather.
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I'm not sure one season does a proper model make.
While yes, I would agree that games aren’t going to be as cold in the Big Ten, several factors go into that.
*In years past, home games aren’t played after Thanksgiving.
*Night games aren’t allowed in November.
*I’d be interested in a long term list to include possible effects of El Nino/La Nino years, which should provide us with cooler game temperatures. This year should be slightly cooler in that respect. I doubt it drops the averages that much, but it’s possible.
*I think straight averaging the weather is a dubious attempt to make it look warmer. I think the better way would to be averaging it by week with a range of values. Straight team averages is weighted heavily by games at the beginning of the season when everyone is hosting.
Just some thoughts.
by formerlyanonymous on Mar 29, 2010 9:40 AM CDT reply actions
re: night games in November...
is that a new thing? because i definitely was at Mich @ OSU 2006 (Game of the Century) and that was a night game.
That Wisconsin game was horrible.
Cold, wet, and a poor result.
Everyone fails. The successful learn from their failures. I just wish we'd quit giving ourselves so many learning opportunities.
by WhiteSpeedReceiver on Mar 29, 2010 10:30 AM CDT reply actions
for the record
Minnesota hosted the single warmest game in the Big Ten last year.
what you say here can, and will, be used against you The Daily Gopher
It will only get worse on average
As the conference as a whole goes post-Thanksgiving starting next season. Moving that last game back a week will not help any as far as weather goes, but the increased big-10 exposure late in the season should.
If they do ever go to a conference title game, Ford Field, Metrodome (and its possible successor) and Lucas Oil Stadium can really be the only stadiums under consideration… It would be too cold elsewhere for a conference title game the first week of December.
I like the idea of a snow bowl.
Some of those games are the best images from years past. I’d love to see a bowl game come to Chicago, as the city offers enough for those visiting, or even Lambeau, as a game on the true Frozen Tundra in January would be amazing.
by formerlyanonymous on Mar 29, 2010 1:58 PM CDT up reply actions
Its all a narrative
Announcers need a narrative and they are lazy and just use shorthand – its cold in Minnesota. You have to argue with facts like Brewster has done for 3 years in terms of game day temps. You do have to keep telling people it is relatively no different in Ann Arbor or Happy Valley than Mpls and then back it up with numbers like in this research. It might even be that Happy Valley gets more snow on game days over a long period. The real solution: Winning a conference title will make the average temp go way up and the need for seat warmers go way down.
Awesome
6 random dates spread across 3 months from 1 f’ing year? lol Oh gee, Purdue was the warmest?? Could that be because they only had ONE home game in Novmber of 2009, Einstine?? Ou, Ou…maybe it was because they had home games on 4 of the first 5 weeks of the season??? Let’s see, is September warmer than November?
Spring Practice through the Regular Season
Miami and Buffalo are the controls. I published these in a 2008 post:
Buck Bravo
is the first one supposed
to look like a rainbow? :)
A Darko Fan since 2010!
by TheEvilProfessor on Mar 31, 2010 12:54 PM CDT up reply actions
Bottom graph is useless
What is it depicting? Monthly snowfall? Snow depth? Feet? Inches? Daily snowfall? Anyone can make up anything and call it official! You do understand what a huge difference 3 degrees is when talking average temps?? Watch Al Gore and his meltdown crew go ape shit over a tenth of a degree if you don’t believe me!!!
Weather underground is the site for historical info. I didn’t write this to “impress” recruits, I wrote it because I thought it was interesting and would draw traffic to our site and make us $. When given a choice, people generally prefer facts to rhetoric and exaggeration.
Buck Bravo
by Buck Bravo on Mar 30, 2010 7:16 AM CDT via mobile up reply actions
I'm still waiting for an Ignore button
Can’t believe in 2010 that any forum board software (which I know is not TDG, but SBNation) doesn’t have an ignore option.
Don't forget that some of the coldest Big Ten games were played in...Florida.
Wisconsin v. Miami in the Champ Sports Bowl: 50º
Iowa v. Georgia Tech in the Orange Bowl: 49º
Not to feed the trolls....but...
PantherHawk is the only person on here using any logic at all. The article is just a horrible use of data. PantherHawk actually dug into it a little, did a little analysis, to show that it’s asinine to conclude that Purdue is “the warmest”. The author started with a conclusion in mind and found a half-assed way of skewing poor data to reach it.
"Dug Into It?"
A 15 second glance and one neuron is about all it took to see through BB’s BS! Shhhhhhhh……now we have spoiled the glory of ‘knowing’ Iowa City is the arctic of the Big 10 for all the little lemmings here! lol
by PantherHawk on Mar 30, 2010 10:04 AM CDT up reply actions
I have to defend the author.
This is not a scientific survey, he’s putting forth some empirical data that shows that the perception of Big Ten football weather is different from the reality. He’s not trying to show that Purdue is a winter haven—he’s just trying to show that Big Ten plays most of its games in decent weather. A would argue that one year is a limited sample—one week of cold temps or a heat wave can increase the coefficient of variation—so it might be good to do it over several years. Alternatively, it would be interesting to compare it to the SEC gameday temps. How many SEC games were played in 90ºF+ days or days with high humidity? That’s every bit as uncomfortable as a 25ºF day.
What Is Being Missed
It’s not the game day temp that matters to recruits!! It is living through 6 months of winter with snow up to your nutcup and constant below ZERO temps in Minneapolis!!
by PantherHawk on Mar 30, 2010 10:07 AM CDT up reply actions
What's also being missed:
In specific regard to Minnesota recruiting is that it’s not weather that keeps Minnesota from getting 90% of its recruits—it’s the lack of recent success and lukewarm fan support. I hope the author isn’t using “weather defamation” as an excuse for soft recruiting classes. I thought it was an exercise to compare Big Ten temps to southern schools, but if it’s to compare Minnesota to other Big Ten schools it’s a bit laughable. Show me one recruit that has signed with Indiana instead of Minnesota because of the warm weather in Bloomington.
Exactly.
"If we got to we're going to crawl in this locker room. And on our back is going to be an axe..."
by buddylee853 on Mar 30, 2010 10:27 AM CDT via mobile up reply actions
Lol, wow, how dumb can you be?
Oh and don’t answer that; it was a rhetorical question.
"If we got to we're going to crawl in this locker room. And on our back is going to be an axe..."
by buddylee853 on Mar 30, 2010 10:25 AM CDT via mobile up reply actions
Nothing personal here, but in this case both you and the head-case have the messed up logic.
The graphs aren’t meant to show how different the avg. temps and snowfall are but rather how similar they are. Using this data it’s clear singling out just a few Big Ten schools for being cold is unjustified.
"If we got to we're going to crawl in this locker room. And on our back is going to be an axe..."
by buddylee853 on Mar 30, 2010 10:16 AM CDT via mobile up reply actions
Before last season started, an announcer on ESPN questioned why a Big Ten school would build an outdoor stadium due to the weather. Complete BS. The post is not intended to show post-Ice Age averages and make predictions for the future, but just to show that in 2009 the stereotypes about Big Ten football weather did not hold true.
Buck Bravo
by Buck Bravo on Mar 30, 2010 11:16 AM CDT via mobile reply actions
No disrespect
but the two worst college football experiences to be found in the BCS conferences were in the Metrodome and in the Carrier Dome. The Linc is a big step up, and I look forward to an epic once-a-decade 15ºF match-up in a Minnesota snowstorm (preferably while watching it on TV).
re:The post is not intended to show post-Ice Age averages and make predictions for the future, but just to show that in 2009 the stereotypes about Big Ten football weather did not hold true.
Ever hear of the year there was no summer? At least that data encompassed an entire season instead of 6 days spread over 3 months…………..
I always thought the most extreme part of MN weather wasn’t the cold, it was the temperature swing. I’d like to point out that MN was either the coldest or the warmest in all games but 1. Many places are warmer and many places are colder, but nowhere is there such variation in temperature as there is in MN.
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