In the sports of American football or Canadian football, the act of icing the kicker or freezing the kicker is the act of calling a timeout immediately prior to the snap before a field goal attempt in order to disrupt the process of kicking a field goal.
The intent is to throw the kicker off of their routine and force them to feel pressure for a longer amount of time.
In contrast, repeated icing in college football is legal provided a team has multiple timeouts remaining.
[1] One variant of this tactic, attributed to former Denver Broncos head coach Mike Shanahan,[2] is to call time out from the sidelines just before the ball is snapped.
[3] A study published in the journal Chance looked at every field-goal attempt made in the 2002 and 2003 NFL seasons, including playoffs, and concluded that, for "pressure kicks", i.e., those made with three minutes or less remaining in the game or overtime period which would tie the game or put the kicking team in the lead, for attempted kicks 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.