A study was undertaken by Scott Berry, a statistician and the former chairman of the Statistics in Sports section of the American Statistical Association, and Craig Wood, a biostatistician, life-long Pittsburgh Steeler fan, who won the Inaugural Henry Hood Center for Health Research Pillar Award, was published in 2004 in the journal Chance.Berry, S., and C. Wood. 2004. The cold-foot effect. Chance 17(No. 4):47-51. Berry and Wood looked at every field-goal attempt made in the 2002 and 2003 NFL seasons, including playoffs, and concluded that, for "pressure kicks" – those made with 3 minutes or less remaining in the game or overtime period which would tie the game or put the kicking team in the lead – in the 40–55 yard range, icing the kicker caused the percentage of successful attempts to drop by about ten percent for an average kicker on a sunny day. On shorter kicks, the effect was found to be negligible.Peterson, Ivars. "Icing the Kicker" Muse (September 2005)Peterson, Ivars. The Iced Foot Effect MathTrek (November 15, 2004) Archived 2004-11-17 at the Wayback Machine However, the statistical significance of the difference found – which amounted to four kicks out of 39 attempts – has been questioned,Birnbaum, Phil. "And (sic) old 'icing the kicker' study" Sabermetric Research (January 6, 2008) and an examination by Nick Stamms of STATS, Inc. found that "pressure kicks" (defined as above except within two minutes, not three) in the NFL regular season from 1991 to 2005 showed an insignificant difference between non-iced kicks (457 out of 637, or 71.7%) and iced kicks (152 out of 211, or 72.0%).Zimmerman, Paul. "Icing on the cake" Si.com (January 21, 2005)
