Thirsty Kansas City Chiefs fans are bitterly disappointed in the bitter cold of Arrowhead Stadium.
Before Saturday’s playoff game against the visiting Miami Dolphins, an attendee filmed themselves getting a bottle of water from the refrigerator, only to have the drink freeze within seconds.
“A little chilly at Arrowhead tonight,” read the caption from a user named Brendan Marquart.
Temperatures approached -30 degrees Fahrenheit with a wind chill ahead of kickoff in Kansas City, where the National Weather Service warned fans to cover all extremities, including their faces.
The game will likely go down as one of the coldest in NFL history, and that’s just the beginning of the league’s weather woes in the opening round of the playoffs.
It only took a few seconds for the water to freeze after taking it out of the refrigerator
Isiah Pacheco #10, Travis Kelce #87 and Patrick Mahomes #15 try to stay warm before the match
The NFL was concerned that no one would be able to make it to the Bills’ game against the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday in Buffalo, where up to several feet of snow was expected overnight. Because of that, league and New York state officials decided to postpone the wild-card playoff game until Monday, when most of the snow is expected to be over.
“We want our Bills to win,” Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said at a news conference in suburban Buffalo, “but we don’t want 60,000 to 70,000 people traveling to the football game in terrible conditions.”
The snow wasn’t the problem in Kansas City, where snowfall tapered off Saturday morning before kickoff. The concern previously was about what the National Weather Service called “dangerously cold” wind chills, which would make a forecast temperature of minus 2 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 18 degrees Celsius) at kickoff feel like minus 24.
‘The spectators must be prepared. Think of a cold ski trip or ice fishing,” says Dr. Sarah Spelsberg, lecturer at Northeastern University’s Graduate Program in Extreme Medicine. ‘If it’s me, I also wear ski goggles. At these temperatures, not an inch of my skin would be visible. I had frostbite once and I never wanted to have it again.”
There have only been four postseason games played in subzero temperatures in NFL history, the most recent being the 2007 NFC title game between the Giants and Packers, when it was minus-3 at kickoff. New York won 23-20 at Lambeau Field in a game perhaps best remembered for the images of Giants coach Tom Coughlin’s frozen face on the sideline.
The coldest game in league history remains minus-13 for the 1967 NFL Championship, when the Packers defeated the Cowboys at Lambeau Field in a game that became known as the Ice Bowl. The wind chill that day was minus-48 degrees.
The weather was worse in Buffalo, where Sunday’s Bills-Steelers were postponed to Monday
“We definitely had that initial shock when we looked at the weather forecasts,” said Chiefs season ticket holder Keaton Schlatter, who came from West Des Moines, Iowa, for Saturday night’s game. “We were thinking about maybe putting our tickets up for sale and if they didn’t sell then we would go. But we decided it was all part of the experience.”
About six hours before kickoff, stadium workers were plowing snow from the tarp covering the field, then shoveling it into trucks and driving it out of the stadium. However, the field itself is heated and should not be a problem for the players.
As for the fans, the Chiefs had numerous warming stations throughout the stadium, and they bent some of their rules to help them deal with the weather. Fans were allowed to bring blankets, provided they had no zippers or compartments, and could use portable chargers to power the kind of heated clothing Schlatter brought to the game.
Fans could also bring cardboard to place under their feet, a helpful tip Chiefs safety Justin Reid passed on this week.
“Trying to figure out what will be the warmest was the worrying part,” said Lauren Bays, a Chiefs fan from Smithville, Missouri. “I’ve been thinking all week about ways to add warmth and have found a pair of ski goggles that I want to wear.”
Miami Dolphins fans watch before the AFC Wild Card Playoffs in frigid Kansas City
Not every fan is such a diehard. Ticket prices on the secondary market plummeted all week as fans tried to empty their seats. The price to enter Saturday was less than $30, or about 10 percent of what it would normally cost.
The weather will almost certainly chill the Dolphins, whose loss to Buffalo last week cost them the opportunity to host a home game this weekend. They practiced all week in warm Miami and it was 86 degrees on Friday when they boarded a plane to Kansas City. It was 10 degrees with a wind chill of minus 6 when they arrived, a difference of almost 100 degrees.
“You can’t prepare for a game like that in that kind of weather, so it will be new,” said Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, who grew up in Hawaii and played his college football in the relative warmth of Alabama.
The coldest game ever played at Arrowhead Stadium was 1 degree at kickoff, set during a game against the Denver Broncos on December 18, 1983, and matched during a game against the Tennessee Titans on December 18, 2016.
Nearly every forecast called for that record to be broken Saturday night.
‘Cold is cold. It’s cold for you and me,” Chiefs coach Andy Reid said. ‘But are you going to do your thing. That’s how you’re going to play.’