We ray-traced every modeled seat in all 136 FBS stadiums, at seven different kickoff times on the same mid-September Saturday, and measured one thing: how many minutes of a four-hour game the average seat actually spends in direct sunlight. The stadium turns out to matter far less than the kickoff.
College football has a problem baseball does not. Baseball plays its day games at roughly the same time everywhere, so a stadium guide that says "sit on the third base side" is usable all season. College football kicks off at 11:00 a.m., noon, 2:30, 3:30, 4:00, 6:00 and 7:30, and the same seat swings from full sun to full shade depending on which of those you drew.
That makes "the best shaded seats at X Stadium" an incomplete question. The complete one is "the best shaded seats at X Stadium for a 3:30 kickoff." So we computed all of them.
Here is the median open-air FBS stadium, same date, same bowl, same everything except when the ball is teed up. This is a four-hour window from kickoff.
| Kickoff | Median stadium, share of game in sun | Sunniest stadium | Shadiest stadium |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11:00 a.m. | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| Noon | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| 2:00 p.m. | 92% | 100% | 78% |
| 3:30 p.m. | 65% | 90% | 43% |
| 4:00 p.m. | 54% | 79% | 31% |
| 6:00 p.m. | 12% | 32% | 1% |
| 7:00 p.m. | 1% | 11% | 0% |
Two hours of kickoff is worth more than any seat you can buy. Moving a game from 2:00 to 4:00 takes the median stadium from 92% sun to 54%. No choice of section anywhere in the country does that much. If your game is at noon, no seat saves you. If it is at 7:00, no seat can hurt you. Everything interesting happens in the middle, and 3:30 is where it happens most.
3:30 p.m. is the single most common kickoff window in the sport and the one where seat choice actually pays. Every bar below is one four-hour game at that stadium, split into the share the average seat spends in sun and the share it spends in shade.
Share of a 3:30 p.m. kickoff the average seat spends in direct sun
Saturday September 12, 2026. Clear skies. Four-hour window. Domed stadiums excluded from the bars.
The intuition is that southern stadiums bake and northern ones do not. At a 3:30 kickoff that is simply wrong. Across all 132 open-air FBS stadiums the correlation between latitude and sun exposure is 0.02, which is no relationship at all. Miami and Minneapolis get the same afternoon.
What does predict it is which way the field points. A stadium built on an east-west axis lets the descending sun run straight down the length of the bowl, where no stand is in its way. A stadium built north-south puts an entire grandstand between the sun and half the seats.
| Field axis | Stadiums | Mean share of a 3:30 game in sun |
|---|---|---|
| Within 22° of east-west | 13 | 80% |
| 22° to 45° off | 8 | 71% |
| 45° to 67° off | 28 | 64% |
| Within 22° of north-south | 83 | 63% |
Waldo Stadium at Western Michigan is the sunniest stadium in FBS at a 3:30 kickoff, 90% of the game, and it sits at 42 degrees north in Michigan. Its field runs 84 degrees, almost exactly east-west. Arizona Stadium at Arizona is the shadiest fully open bowl at 43%, and it is in the Sonoran Desert. Its field runs 180 degrees, almost exactly north-south.
Most stadium architects were not thinking about your neck. They were thinking about the sun being in a quarterback's eyes, which is why so much of the sport is built north-south. That decision, made decades ago, is the single biggest thing separating a comfortable afternoon from a miserable one.
Ask a hundred fans which seats shade first and most will say the upper deck, because it is farther from the field and higher up. It is backwards, and it is backwards everywhere.
At all 132 open-air FBS stadiums, the upper level takes more sun over a 3:30 kickoff than the lower level. Not most of them. All of them. Averaged across the sport the lower bowl spends 58% of the game in sun, the club level 64%, and the upper deck 72%. There is no exception anywhere in FBS.
The reason is that a seating bowl rises at roughly the same pitch the late-afternoon sun descends. The stand opposite you is a wall, and a wall shadows what is behind and below its top edge first. Front rows drop into shadow early. The top rows have nothing above or behind them and are the last thing in the stadium still lit.
The practical version: on the shaded sideline, lower is better. On the sunny sideline, nothing is better.
At a 3:30 kickoff on this date, the single most sun-punished area we model is the north corner upper deck at Sanford Stadium in Athens, Georgia: in direct sunlight for 100% of the game, all four hours, no relief at any point. Sanford's field runs 115 degrees, a diagonal that leaves the northeast shoulder of the bowl square to the afternoon sun for the entire game.
At the other end, the coolest single area anywhere in FBS at that kickoff is the west lower bowl at Arizona Stadium, at 16% sun. That is the best it gets. There is no seat in college football that is genuinely shaded for a 3:30 kickoff in September, only seats that are less exposed than others.
Want this for your actual game?
▶ Open the live shade mapPick your stadium, date and kickoff. It is free, and there is no signup.
Sorted by a 3:30 p.m. kickoff. The three domed stadiums are at the bottom at 0%. Click any stadium for its full per-area guide and a live map you can set to your own game and kickoff.
| # | Stadium | Noon | 2:00 | 3:30 | 4:00 | 7:00 | Shaded side (3:30) | Sunniest area |
|---|
All figures are the share of a four-hour game the average seat spends in direct sun, area-weighted across the bowl. "Shaded side" is the sideline with the most shade over the game, and the percentage is how much of the game that side is shaded.
The engine behind this is the same one that runs the live ShadeMe map, so any number here can be checked against the app.
This is the part most stadium rankings skip, so we will be direct about it.
Every stadium here shares one calibrated seating bowl. Unlike our MLB work, where four ballparks are individually modeled, no FBS stadium has its real tier-by-tier architecture built. What is stadium-specific is coordinates, timezone, field bearing and roof type. What is generic is the shape of the stands.
What that means in practice:
We would rather publish a ranking with its seams showing than one that quietly implies more precision than the model has.
At a 3:30 p.m. kickoff, Waldo Stadium at Western Michigan, where the average seat is in direct sun for 90% of the game. At a noon kickoff every open-air stadium in FBS ties at 100%.
The three domes are fully shaded. Among open-air stadiums the shadiest at a 3:30 kickoff is Arizona Stadium at Arizona, 43%, followed by Mountain America Stadium at 47%. Hard Rock Stadium, the only canopied stadium in FBS, comes in lower still at 30%.
The lower bowl, at every one of the 132 open-air FBS stadiums. Most fans guess the opposite. A seating bowl rises at roughly the same angle the afternoon sun descends, so shade climbs from the front rows upward and the top rows are the last to cool off.
Yes, by a wide margin. The median FBS stadium goes from 92% of the game in sun at a 2:00 kickoff to 54% at 4:00 and 1% at 7:00. No section choice at any stadium moves the number that far.
No. This ranking is clear-sky geometry. The live map does pull real cloud, temperature and UV for your specific game.
The full per-area results, every zone in every stadium at every kickoff time, are free to reuse: charts, tables, quotes, any of it. We only ask for a link back to this page so readers can see the method. If you cover a specific school and want its numbers broken out further, or want the model run at a kickoff time or date we did not cover here, get in touch and we will run it.
Buying seats for a day game?
🎟 Find college football tickets on TicketNetworkAffiliate link. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Check the shade map first, then pick your section.
Every stadium has a full shade guide with a live, playable map:
All 136 FBS stadium shade guides →
More: The sunniest seats in baseball · 30 MLB ballpark shade guides · 32 NFL stadium shade guides
Independent tool. Not affiliated with the NCAA, any conference, school or venue. Team and stadium names are used descriptively.