Kicker is the one fantasy position where the building matters almost as much as the leg. A field goal is a physics problem — air density, wind, and temperature all change how far a ball will fly — and a kicker who spends half his season indoors or a mile above sea level has a measurably different job than one kicking into a January lake-effect wind. These three rules price the venue. They are all small by design: the effects are real but modest, and kicker is not a position to over-engineer.
Fires when a kicker's home venue is a dome or retractable-roof stadium (DET, MIN, NO, LV, DAL, HOU, IND, ARI, ATL, LAR, LAC).
A controlled indoor environment removes the two things that hurt kickers most: wind and cold. Public data puts dome kickers modestly ahead of the league average on a per-game basis, and the strongest driver is simply avoiding adverse wind — 20-plus-mph gusts measurably drag kicker scoring down, and a domed kicker never faces them at home. The honest caveat, reflected in the small +4% size, is that the effect is weak and inconsistent across multi-year studies, and part of the raw gap comes from dome teams historically fielding good offenses that generate more scoring chances regardless of roof. Retractable roofs add a wrinkle — the home team decides whether it is open — so "dome" is a soft label for some of these venues. A deliberately light boost is the appropriate response to a real but noisy signal.
Fires when the kicker plays home games for the Denver Broncos.
Denver's altitude — about 5,280 feet — thins the air to roughly 82% of sea-level density, cutting the aerodynamic drag on a kicked ball. Controlled analysis of visiting kickers in Denver (which sidesteps any home-team selection bias) found roughly five yards of extra effective range there, and three of the five longest field goals in NFL history have been kicked in Denver. Over eight home games a season, that range advantage is a real, repeatable edge for the Broncos' kicker, worth a 5% boost. Note the rule applies only to the home kicker: a visiting kicker gets the same physics but for a single road game a year, which is noise across a season, so no season-long boost is warranted for opponents. The altitude edge can also be partly offset by cold in December games — which is exactly why Denver is excluded from the cold-weather rule below, to avoid applying two contradictory adjustments to the same player.
Fires when a kicker's home venue is a consistently cold, windy outdoor market: GB, BUF, NE, CHI, CLE, PIT, CIN, or KC.
This is the mirror image of the dome boost. Cold, dense air and winter wind both shorten a kicker's effective range and drop his accuracy: a 30-degree temperature drop is worth roughly five extra yards of required distance, and field-goal percentage falls meaningfully in the coldest conditions. The eight teams in this set are the outdoor markets whose late-season game conditions are reliably adverse — driven by temperature in places like Green Bay and Buffalo and by wind in lake-effect cities like Cleveland and Chicago. Domed teams are excluded (they have their own boost), and Denver is excluded so its altitude advantage is not cancelled by a weather penalty. The −4% is set conservatively — the mirror of the dome boost — because the team-by-team cutoff relies on climate averages rather than game-level field-goal data.