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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 a dozen or more starting kickers are 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.

Week 8 Results

Jake Elliott (0 FG attempts, 0 FGs, 5 XPs, 5 points)

Elliott was the first of our three "great plays" of the week and the first of the three to fall prey to "Too Many Touchdowns Syndrome". The Eagles moved the ball well against the Steelers, but the lack of field goal attempts means Elliott finished the week tied for 18th.

Jason Sanders (1 FG attempt, 1 FG, 4 XPs, 7 points)

Sanders is the second of our "great plays" to succumb to "Too Many Touchdowns Syndrome". One field goal attempt means he fared better than Elliott but still finished just 11th among kickers.

Greg Joseph (1 FG attempt, 0 FGs, 4 XPs, 4 points)

Greg Joseph is our third top play victimized by "Too Many Touchdown Syndrome". Joseph did have a 56-yard field goal blocked at the end of the first half and a fifth extra point that hit the upright, but "almost" and "maybe" doesn't count, so Joseph finished the week tied for 25th.

Mike Badgley (2 FG attempts, 2 FGs, 3 XPs, 9 points)

Finally some field goals. The Lions found themselves in a shootout with the Dolphins and while their opponent suffered from Too Many Touchdowns Syndrome, the Lions didn't quite have enough. Their loss is our gain, though, as Badgley's 9 points tied for 5th-most on the week.

Wil Lutz (2 FG attempts, 1 FG, 3 XPs, 6 points)

Lutz made an easy 37-yard field goal and missed an easy 38-yard field goal. His 6 points were good for 16th.

Thoughts on What's Going On So Far

If you've been following along this year, you certainly don't need another reminder of how weird the season has been and how poorly our model has fared. As I keep mentioning, the model has been the model for years, so it's not as if it's suddenly broken. But I continue to investigate what's behind the poor performance, and I believe I have a qualified answer. Of sorts.

Last year, kickers made 874 field goals against 1174 extra points, which means that 42.67% of all successful kicks were field goals. This year offenses have been struggling, and that shows up in the kicking data; kickers have made 402 field goals against 509 extra points, meaning 44.13% of all successful kicks have been field goals.

Rent-a-Kicker has seen no such bump, however. Our 40 recommendations to date have made 54 field goals against 97 extra points, meaning just 35.76% of all kicks have been field goals. If our recommendations had the same number of successful kicks but were kicking field goals at the league average rate, our average would rise from 6.48 points per game to 7.11 points per game.

But the problem is actually more acute than that. The highlighted "Good Plays" have 32 field goals against 45 extra points, a field goal rate of 41.56%, and that's not too far off of the league average. Which is perhaps why our "Good Plays" are scoring right in line with their 2020/2019 averages-- 6.71 points per game so far this year vs. 6.74 points per game in 2020. (2021 was, as I noted at the time, a massive positive outlier for our model, with kickers from all categories scoring north of 8 points per game.)

But our "Great Plays" so far? After this week's catastrophic showing, they've converted 22 field goals against 52 extra points, a rate of just 29.73%. If our great plays were performing on par with league average here, their per-game average would rise from 6.21 to 7.33 (compared to 7.59 in 2020), or essentially right on historical averages (especially after accounting for the fact that scoring is down across the board).

The question then becomes why are our top recommendations kicking so many extra points relative to field goals? Is it a problem with our model and our preference for kickers on teams that are likely to score a lot? It's possible. But it's worth noting that I looked at this exact question in 2020 when the model kept recommending a kicker that kept falling prey to Too Many Touchdowns Syndrome. And the end result was that kickers with extremely high extra point to field goal ratios at the time of the investigation scored substantially more points over the next four weeks than kickers with extremely low extra point to field goal ratios (despite the latter being significantly more productive at the time of the investigation).

At the end of the day, the ability to repeatedly move the ball into scoring position is a meaningful offensive skill. But the ability to score touchdowns instead of field goals is largely just noise, and over time every team's scoring mix trends back toward the league average. Hopefully, our future recommendations will bear this out.

Results To Date

To date, Rent-a-Kicker has made 40 weekly recommendations. Those 40 kickers have averaged 6.48 points, compared to 8.45 in 2021, 7.39 in 2020, 7.65 in 2019, and 7.43 in 2018. That average would currently rank just 18th at the position (after giving 6 points to every kicker who has had their bye week already). Our top weekly recommendation averages just 5.50 points, and every highlighted kicker with a great matchup averages 6.21, marks that would rank 27th and 19th.

Here are the Top 12 kickers by preseason ADP along with how many points they've scored to date in parentheses: Justin Tucker (70), Tyler Bass (63), Matt Gay (46), Harrison Butker (51*), Daniel Carlson (67), Evan McPherson (50), Matt Prater (42), Ryan Succop (66), Brandon McManus (53), Nick Folk (63), Dustin Hopkins (51), and Rodrigo Blankenship (46*). (Starred kickers are credited with 6 additional points for every week they missed)

So far, the Top 12 kickers by preseason ADP average 55.7 points compared to 49.7 from the average of all of our great plays, which (despite another mediocre week last week) is still the closest we've been in a while. If we've been struggling, at least we can content ourselves that many of the "chalk" kickers have been struggling, as well.

Week 9 Situations

**Here is a list of the teams with the best matchups based on Vegas projected totals and stadium, along with the expected kicker for each team. The top five players 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 specifically apply to situations; teams will occasionally change kickers mid-week, but any endorsements apply equally to whatever kicker winds up eventually getting the start.**

Please note that this is likely the last chance we'll have to add Harrison Butker, kicker for arguably the best offense in the NFL. If we wanted to draft him before the season, we would have needed to spend non-trivial draft capital to do so. Instead, if you're in one of the 60% of leagues where Butker is still on the street, strongly consider adding him and just playing him for the remainder of the season.

Great Plays