A FEW HOURS before kickoff of the Jan. 20, 2008, NFC Championship Game between the Giants and Packers in frigid Green Bay, around 10 New York players did what they always do: took a walk around the field.
They were bundled up, with temperatures falling to minus 1 with a minus 23 wind chill. Their vaporized breath filled the air; the cold snapped at their faces.
Suddenly, they were slapped with another cold reality: No player from Green Bay was on the field.
“They knew a little more than we did,” former Giants punter Jeff Feagles said. “That’s when I knew it was going to be super, super cold.”
The severity of the cold didn’t surprise the Giants players. They read the weather reports. They brought extra clothing and toe and hand warmers. They brought the usual halftime refreshments appropriate for cold weather — broth and hot chocolate.
But it wasn’t enough early on. During pregame warmups, despite wearing gloves for the first time in his 21-year career, Feagles, who also served as the holder for kicker Lawrence Tynes, said his hands and feet were so cold that when it was time for him to take some practice kicks he caught one snap and opted not to kick. He said it was the only time in his career that he did not punt a ball in warmups.
“I was freezing and didn’t want to put bad thoughts in my head,” said Feagles, whose hands would become important to the outcome. “I remember putting my hands underneath the sink with warm water and my hands just started to hurt.
“I’m like, ‘Oh, God, this is ridiculous.'”
While not as severe as what Feagles & Co. experienced, frigid weather will await the Bears and Los Angeles Rams in Sunday’s NFC divisional round game in Chicago, where the temperature for the 6:30 p.m. ET kickoff (NBC, Peacock) is forecast to be 16 degrees, with wind gusts around 20 mph that will make it feel like 4 degrees.
More than a dozen current and former NFL players told ESPN that preparing to play in below-freezing temperatures is a challenge that comes with many considerations and strategies. Players know they must be physically prepared, with some — such as Rams QB Matthew Stafford, perhaps inspired by Tom Brady — wearing scuba suits to fend off the cold.
There’s also mental prep. Players hunt for signs the weather is affecting an opponent in order to gain a psychological or on-field advantage. Others, such as Von Miller, play mind games to convince themselves that others have played in worse conditions.
Other hurdles include frozen fingers getting jammed and numb hands changing the way offensive linemen approach their blocking assignments. Even the simple act of drinking water becomes a difficult task. On a more serious note is the risk of frostbite, which Dolphins defensive lineman Zach Sieler and former Seattle Seahawks safety Kam Chancellor said they’ve both suffered during games.
How well players navigate the frigid conditions can impact the outcome of games. That’s especially true for teams and players unaccustomed to the cold. According to ESPN Research, teams from warm climates are 3-12 in the past 10 postseasons when the temperature is 32 degrees or lower, with Houston‘s wild-card win at Pittsburgh on Monday representing the most recent such contest.
Although players differ on their approach, many agree there is one thing that can warm their bodies instantly: winning.
That’s what Feagles remembers most about the game at Lambeau.
In overtime, the Giants’ ticket to Super Bowl XLII rested on a 47-yard Tynes field goal attempt. Tynes trotted out, and Feagles, with his tackified receiver gloves on, prepped to hold.
“It was a high snap, and I was able to get it down. I knew once he hit it he had the distance because I could tell the sound of it. It started out right, but I knew it was coming back right to left,” Feagles said of the successful kick, which gave the Giants a 23-20 victory. “Then Lawrence left me hanging there and ran right into the locker room. I guess he just wanted the warmth.
“I’ll tell you one thing, I did not feel an ounce of cold after the game was over.”
LEAVE IT TO Brady to come up with a unique way to combat the cold. New England‘s divisional round game against the Tennessee Titans on Jan. 10, 2004, was considered the coldest game in Pats franchise history — 4 degrees at kickoff; a wind chill of minus 10.
Brady, who went 35-8 in games when the temperature at kickoff was 32 degrees or less, knew what he was doing. He told ESPN’s Mike Reiss in 2017 that the suit “insulates you from the cold. It keeps the wind from penetrating, and it really doesn’t limit movement too much.”
If it worked for Brady, then it must be worth trying. Stafford said he wore one when he played for Detroit in cold weather games. The Lions played in a dome but visited Green Bay and Chicago every year.
“I’ve worn it quite a few times since I’ve been here,” said Stafford, who joined the Rams in 2021. “It keeps you warmer. That’s how it affects me. It’s not skintight or anything like that.”
His coach, Sean McVay, is a proponent of it as well.
“Yeah, I throw on a damn scuba suit underneath,” McVay said last month, reminiscing about a Week 16 game at the New York Jets, where the wind chill was 6 degrees. “I got that trick from Matthew. I said, ‘This thing is awfully snug, but it is nice and warm.’ I don’t do much. My mom always gets on me about not wearing a hat because my little ears and my hands get so frozen.”
But that doesn’t mean everyone swears by the garb. Quarterback Marcus Mariota wore one while playing for the Titans during a game at the Kansas City Chiefs in the 2017 postseason — a suggestion from former Brady teammate Matt Cassell. It was one of two pieces of equipment that failed Mariota that day.
“I was somewhat warm with it, but I just felt like it was kind of restricting as a thrower,” Mariota said. “I remember I usually wear a visor, and pregame had to take the visor off. From my breath, it froze the eye shield, and it was crazy. They couldn’t even get it off my helmet until we got back into the locker room.”
Former Chiefs offensive lineman Nick Allegretti, currently with the Washington Commanders, played in a handful of cold weather games each season in Kansas City. They practiced 20 to 30 days in cold weather and had a chance to learn how to dress for such conditions.
“I still go sleeveless just because I don’t like playing with sleeves,” said Allegretti, who was a reserve lineman in the Chiefs’ 2024 playoff win over Miami. “I would do a scuba suit and then thermal [shirt], double socks, usually like a small thin winter glove under the gloves. … Obviously, it was much colder [vs. Miami], so I just amped it up a little bit.”
Edge rusher Von Miller played in Buffalo and Denver and said because of heated benches and insulated jackets available to players, he doesn’t feel the need to wear anything extra but a turtleneck.
“Practicing in the cold is different than playing in the cold,” Miller said. “Playing in the cold, we got everything that we need. You got hand warmers. You got shoe warmers. The bench is heated.
“And then you’re only going out [on the field] for five minutes. Then you’re coming back to the sideline and putting the jackets on, getting bundled up on the sideline. Games are not as bad as people think.”
San Francisco receiver Kendrick Bourne, who played in cold weather in college at Eastern Washington, has his system down: long sleeves, maybe tights. But only one layer.
“You don’t need to wear a ton because I’m going to get hot and it could slow me down. You can always heat up. You can’t cool down,” he said. “Once you’re in the game and adrenaline [is] going, you’re good. But the hardest part is pregame and early on.”
Guard Andrew Wylie, who played in cold weather games with the Chiefs from 2017 to 2022, uses the heaters on the bench to keep his hands warm before taking the field. He also sticks his cleats in front of them to “stay hot for a minute or two.”
“Just keeping feelings in the body parts that have the most contact,” he said.
Bears safety Kevin Byard III played in extreme cold weather twice, also at Kansas City. As a rookie in 2016, the temperature was 1 degree; four years later, the Titans played at Arrowhead in the AFC Championship Game when it was 17 degrees at kickoff.
“The whole lead-up — warmups, when you’re kind of just standing around — that’s the annoying part,” Byard said. “The TV timeouts, I stand over by the heaters and when there’s 30 seconds left in the TV timeout, I run back on the field and get the playcall. During the game, you’re thinking about the game and what the offense is doing. Both teams have to play in the same weather.”
Another strategy: the halftime drink. Some players drink bone or chicken broth. Allegretti preferred hot chocolate.
With mini marshmallows?
“Oh, yeah. You have to,” he said. “But halftime is never shorter than during a cold game because you finally get warm and they’re like, ‘Two minutes!’ It’s a challenge.”
BOBBY WAGNER WITNESSED a first while warming up for a Jan. 10, 2016, NFC wild-card game in Minnesota.
The Vikings were in between stadiums, transitioning from the Metrodome, their home from 1982 to 2013, to their current digs, U.S. Bank Stadium, which opened for the 2016 season. In the meantime, they played at the University of Minnesota’s open-air TCF Bank Stadium, which is where Wagner and his Seahawks teammates encountered temperatures that plummeted to minus 6 degrees with a minus 25 wind chill.
“I saw somebody sneeze, and I saw it turning to ice before it hit their lip,” Wagner said.
Chancellor said he noticed black marks on his fingertips and fingernails a couple of days after that Seattle win. After being diagnosed by doctors, he was told he had frostbite.
“I had never had frostbite,” Chancellor told ESPN. “I was like, ‘Wait, are y’all going to cut my fingers off?'”
When it turns bitterly cold, players must account for even the smallest things, such as squirting water into their mouths. Miller knows why, thanks to Denver’s 2013 divisional round overtime loss to Baltimore.
“If you don’t get [the water] all in your mouth, and it spills on your mustache or your shirt, it icicled up,” Miller said. “[Ravens guard] Marshall Yonda had a beard, and he had icicles in his beard, and he had icicles on his chest.”
There are also painful scenes: Giants coach Tom Coughlin’s bright red face in that 2008 game.
“I thought he was going to permanently have skin damage,” Feagles said.
Not even the equipment is safe. In that 2024 game between the Chiefs and Dolphins — played in conditions Dolphins left tackle Terron Armstead called “borderline inhumane” — a Miami defender hit Chiefs’ quarterback Patrick Mahomes hard enough to knock a piece of the plastic shell from his helmet, perhaps made brittle by the cold. He needed a replacement, which the club had on the sideline.
There was just one problem.
“It was like frozen,” Mahomes said after the game.
The cold often exacts a painful toll on linemen.
“The worst part is a jammed finger. You jam a finger in the cold, and it’s shattered,” Allegretti said. “You make it through a cold game without jamming a finger, that’s rare. They’re just more rigid.”
The hardest part for them, Wylie said, is keeping their hands warm. He said in some games he couldn’t feel the defender with his hands.
“You’re just patty-caking,” he said. “You’re not striking and grabbing. You’ve got to have feeling in your hands.”
Even penmanship suffers. In 2007, in his third year with Green Bay as a backup, quarterback Aaron Rodgers experienced his coldest game when the Packers played at Chicago on Dec. 23. Wind gusts of 22 miles an hour turned a 16-degree day into a minus 22 wind chill.
“I was trying to chart plays, and my fingers were shaking so bad, in the second quarter I said I can’t even write at this point,” Rodgers said.
THE COLD ALSO presents opportunities to gain an advantage on opponents if you know what to look for.
Offensive linemen “don’t like to grab as much,” Miller said. “They don’t like to shoot their hands as much. I like it as cold as possible. So long as the field’s not frozen, as long as it’s not snowing, it’s good. Once it starts snowing, it evens out because guys can wrestle you and you can’t hit those [rush] angles that you want.”
Before the Chiefs’ 26-7 win over Miami in 2024, Allegretti said he knew during pregame warmups that Miami was struggling.
“On the jumbotron, you saw them staring at the clock, like huddled up, waiting ’til the last second to jog out,” Allegretti said. “It was almost a 100-degree change for them. Mentally, I don’t know how they were going to find a way to win that game because it was frozen. Guys who are tough normally were frozen.”
Wagner said they looked for little signs against Minnesota.
“I saw a guy come out and he was just no sleeves,” Wagner said. “And then the next drive he had a [ski] mask on and we was like, ‘OK, we got him.’ I’m like, mentally we got him, so we already won. … It’s all mental.”
Such was the case for Jimmie Giles and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in a December 1985 game later dubbed the “Snow Bowl.” Giles, a tight end, and the Bucs left a city that was 81 degrees on Dec. 1 for a game at Green Bay, where that same day the wind chill was zero degrees.
They prepared for the cold as much as a team coming from warm weather could. But they were greeted by even worse weather than anticipated: 14 inches of snow fell before, during and after the game.
They lost 21-0.
“We had no concept it was going to be like that,” said Giles, who added that the Bucs had no heated benches and their jackets lacked insulation. “You have to come up for air and take your helmet off to get the snow out of your face. I’d never seen that much snow before.
“We just weren’t prepared.”
Miller likes to convince himself that he has an advantage — physically and mentally — over his opponent on a frozen turf. That’s one of the reasons he loved playing in Buffalo from 2022 to 2024, citing the cold and lack of five-star amenities contributing to a tougher experience for opponents.
Could he tell his opponent didn’t want to be there?
“Not really, but in my head that’s the game that I play,” he said. “Maybe it’s me saying I don’t want to be here. But I’m convincing myself that it’s actually them feeling like they don’t want to be there.”
Mind games don’t always work.
Rams edge rusher Jared Verse was born in Ohio, attended high school in Pennsylvania and spent three years of his college career in upstate New York at Albany. He thought he was friends with the cold. Before that Jets game last month, he went shirtless in warmups.
“Not happening again,” he said. “That was the coldest game I’ve ever played in my life. At Albany, we used to practice in the snow, so that’s saying a lot.
“It was freezing that game. We were on the sideline, and me and [Byron Young] looked at each other and I was like, ‘I’m not doing that again.'”
Players say winning ultimately cures the cold. Feagles instantly heated up as he gleefully ran off the field in Green Bay. But there are no such warming effects on the losing sideline.
Bourne realized that truth in the 2021 wild-card game after his Patriots lost to the Bills in 7-degree weather.
“It makes it even colder,” Bourne said.
Nick Wagoner, Sarah Barshop, Courtney Cronin, Brooke Pryor and Rob Demovsky contributed to this story.
