No position is more unpredictable in fantasy football than kickers. Year after year after year, no position has a lower correlation between where they're drafted before the season and where they finish after the season. No position has a lower correlation between how they score in one week and how they score in the next. No position has a lower correlation between projected points and actual points.
In addition, placekicker is the position that has the smallest spread between the best players and the middle-of-the-pack players for fantasy. Finally, most fantasy GMs will only carry one kicker at a time, which means there are a dozen or more starting kickers sitting around on waivers at any given time. Given all of this, it rarely makes sense to devote resources to the position. Instead, GMs are best served by rotating through whichever available kicker has the best weekly matchup.
Every week, I'll rank the situations each kicker finds himself in (ignoring the talent of the kicker himself) to help you find perfectly startable production off the waiver wire.
Introduction
If you've played fantasy football for a while, you're undoubtedly familiar with the common recommendation that you not bother drafting a kicker until your very last pick of the draft. You might not be sure why this is the best way to go, however.
In 2013, Chase Stuart looked at average draft position (ADP) data dating back to the year 2000. For each position, he calculated how many points over replacement owners got on average from the first player drafted at a position, from the second, from the third, and so on.
In 2005, the first quarterback off the board was Peyton Manning, who had a strong season and finished the year 3rd at his position. In 2008, the first quarterback off the board was Tom Brady, who got injured in his first game and produced essentially no value. Average together Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, and every other quarterback who came off the board first in any given year, and the average value of the top quarterback selected was about 80 fantasy points over replacement.
Repeat that process for every player at every position and you get the following graph:
Pay close attention to that blue line at the bottom. That's what kind of value you can expect from drafting a kicker. The first kicker off the board in any given year typically outscores the 12th kicker off the board in any given year by a whopping 2.5 points. Not 2.5 points per game, but 2.5 points total. Over the full season.
So there's no compelling reason to be the first GM to draft a kicker. Or the second GM, or the third. For that matter, there's no real reason to be the eighth or the tenth. In fact, unless your league mandates it, there's really no reason to draft a kicker at all!
Indeed, it's possible to get very competitive production from your kicker spot without spending a single resource on it all season long simply by grabbing whatever dregs and castoffs your league has left on the waiver wire and starting it every week. Which is what this column is for— we'll identify mediocre kickers with phenomenal matchups who are likely to be free agents in your league and track how they perform throughout the season. And since accountability is a big deal around here, we'll track our results so you can see just how much production you really can get by treating kickers are interchangeable pieces in a larger machine.
Methodology
There are a few positive indicators for which kickers are likely to have better weeks. Talent is certainly one of those indicators. The problem for our purposes is that talent is expensive. Justin Tucker might just be the best kicker in NFL history— a claim that I do not make lightly. As a result, he typically scores slightly more than you might expect from an average kicker in the same situations. But Justin Tucker is also the second kicker off the board right now by ADP and we're determined not to pay a premium.
As a result, my model doesn't even consider kicker talent in making its weekly recommendations. We can't afford the best guys and everyone else is pretty undifferentiated talent-wise. Typically outside of the Justin Tuckers of the world the only difference between a "good" kicker and a "bad" kicker is one guy is on a hot streak and the other guy is on a cold streak. From 2011 to 2013, Green Bay's kickers made 86%, 64%, and 89% of their field goal attempts, respectively. Except Green Bay's kicker all three years was the same guy— Mason Crosby.
Most kickers in the NFL are Mason Crosbys. They're basically 80% kickers who sometimes go get lucky or unlucky over short stretches. So like I said, we won't even consider talent.
What we will consider is the projected Las Vegas point spread and game location. Typically we want kickers on offenses who are projected to score lots of points because lots of points means lots of kicks. We prefer kickers in domes or Denver and would rather avoid kickers in places like Buffalo, New York or Green Bay, Wisconsin, especially late in the season. Finally, we want to avoid kickers who are big underdogs, because teams that trail by a lot often eschew field goal attempts to go for it on 4th down.
2018 Results
If you're still a little bit skeptical about how effective streaming kickers off of the waiver wire can be, I tracked the results of all of my picks through last year and summarized them here. Here's the upshot:
- If you started my top weekly pick every week of the year, you would have finished with the 8th-most valuable "kicker" in your league.
- If you selected one of my top 5 weekly recommendations at random, you would have finished with the 11th-most valuable "kicker".
- These rankings underrate your true production relative to your leaguemates because several of the kickers who finished ahead of this streaming amalgam were not drafted or started in many of their big games. In fact, some of the kickers who finished ahead of this amalgam were players we picked up and started early in the season who you could have easily held on and continued to start afterward.
- The top three kickers in the draft outscored our streaming kicker selections by about 8 points on the season. Our streamers outperformed the rest of all drafted kickers, on average, despite being guys we literally added for free after the draft was over.
I expect similar results this year and will continue to track outcomes every week so you can see how we're doing.
Week 1 Situations
**Since streaming kickers is so popular and rostered players can vary across leagues, here is a list of how favorable every kicker's situation is based on Vegas projected totals and stadium. Quality plays who are on waivers in over 50% of leagues based on NFL.com roster percentages are italicized and will be highlighted in next week's column. Also, note that these rankings are kicker-agnostic; teams will occasionally change kickers mid-week, but any endorsements apply equally to whatever kicker winds up eventually getting the start.**
Great Plays
Wil Lutz, NO
**Brett Maher, Dal
Stephen Gostkowski, NE
**Dan Bailey, Min
**Jason Myers, Sea
Jake Elliott, Phi
Good Plays
Greg Zuerlein, LAR
Harrison Butker, KC
**Matt Prater, Det
Mike Badgley, LAC
Robbie Gould, SF
Justin Tucker, Bal
**Zane Gonzalez, Ari
Matt Gay, TB
Austin Seibert, Cle
Josh Lambo, Jax
Eddie Pineiro, Chi
Neutral Plays
Ka'imi Fairbairn, Hou
Matt Bryant, Atl
Chris Boswell, Pit
Joey Slye, Car
Poor Plays
Daniel Carlson, Oak
Brandon McManus, Den
Mason Crosby, GB
Kaare Vedvik, NYJ
Avoid at All Costs
Aldrick Rosas, NYG
Steve Hauschka, Buf
Ryan Succop, Ten
Adam Vinatieri, Ind
Dustin Hopkins, Was
Randy Bullock, Cin
Jason Sanders, Mia
