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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 12 Results

Riley Patterson (0 FG attempts, 0 FGs, 0 XPs, 0 points)

Ouch. This one stings. In a week where Patterson was the only available "great play" (other than Brandon Aubrey of the Cowboys, who hopefully many of my readers have been holding for weeks as suggested), he put up the first 0 in Rent-a-Kicker's history. Patterson missed Detroit's first extra point attempt, then Detroit fell behind big and went for 2-point conversion attempts after each of their next two touchdowns to try to make up the points. Needless to say, Patterson finished dead last among all kickers.

Jason Sanders (2 FG attempts, 2 FGs, 4 XPs, 10 points)

Here's another player we've long advocated holding; I hope as many of you as possible held him rather than switching to Patterson. Early in the year the Dolphins were scoring nothing but touchdowns, but their scoring mix has regressed closer to league average and Sanders' production has risen to match; he's the #5 scoring kicker in the two weeks since Miami's bye, including tying for third last week with ten points.

Brandon McManus (4 FG attempts, 3 FGs, 1 XP, 10 points)

McManus missed from 55 yards, and lost out on an extra point when the Jaguars went for two after their second touchdown, but made attempts from 40, 48, and 53 to carry Jacksonville to a 3-point win against a surging Houston Texans squad. Like Sanders, he finished tied for 3rd among kickers.

Jake Moody (1 FG attempt, 1 FGs, 4 XPs, 7 points)

Moody's lone field goal came from 32 yards and the 49ers were not often stopped against the Seahawks. His seven points tied for 11th in Week 12.

Matt Ammendola (2 FG attempts, 0 FGs, 3 XPs, 3 points)

Both of Ammendola's misses came on tough kicks, first from 50 yards and then a potential game-tying kick from 58 that came up just short, hitting the crossbar. It's not a total surprise as Ammendola-- a replacement kicker filling in for the injured Kaimi Fairbairn-- has never hit a kick longer than 49 yards in his career. Ammendola ranked 28th last week, but better days are ahead.

A Tip for Holding Kickers

In Week 4, I gave a quick rule of thumb for when to hold on to a kicker instead of streaming. As a recap, the order of players within a tier is only of minor importance, but each tier you drop down costs you about half a point per game in expectation. I'd start a kicker I wanted to hold over an option rated one tier higher, but I'd rather avoid starting one over a kicker rated two tiers higher if I could, and I'd never start a kicker over an option rated three or four tiers higher.

I also provided a list of kickers I would consider holding rather than continuing to stream. Since that seems potentially useful, I'm going to turn it into a recurring weekly feature. Here's the current list (in no particular order): Harrison Butker, Justin Tucker, Tyler Bass, Jake Elliott, Jason Sanders, Brandon Aubrey, Jake Moody, and Riley Patterson.

Any other kicker is, in my opinion, expendable for anyone with a better matchup this week.

Results To Date

To date, Rent-a-Kicker has made 60 weekly recommendations. Those 60 kickers have averaged 7.58 points, compared to 6.82 in 2022, 8.45 in 2021, 7.39 in 2020, and 7.39 in 2019. That average would currently rank 8th at the position (though many of the players ahead have spent significant time on waivers, as well). Our top weekly recommendation averages 6.08 points per game, while all recommended "great plays" average 7.88. The former figure would rank 27th; the latter figure would rank 8th.

You're probably as tired of reading about the huge split between our top pick and the rest of our great plays as I am of writing about it. I just want to reiterate: the model isn't really optimized for ranking players within tiers as much as it is for separating between tiers, so order is not especially meaningful. But there's no reason why our top choice should perform worse than our second choice, and there's no history of it doing so before, so we have to chalk this up to just random chance being especially unkind.

(The only comfort I have is that since rostered kickers vary so much from league to league and many of my readers are likely holding their favorite kicker from week to week, the number of readers who have actually been starting my "top pick" every week is likely rather low. This is cold comfort if you count yourself among that number, and I do feel terrible, but there's nothing really to be done-- variance is going to do what variance does. (If you want to pivot to my second-highest recommendation of the week, though, I don't really blame you.)

If you've been following along, you should expect to have scored between 73 (the average of our top picks) and 94.6 points (the average of all our great plays). Here are the Top 12 kickers by preseason ADP as well as how many points they would have gotten you (giving a 6-point bonus for any weeks they may have missed): Justin Tucker (98), Daniel Carlson (78), Harrison Butker (94), Tyler Bass (88), Evan McPherson (80), Younghoe Koo (89), Jason Meyers (101), Jake Elliott (96), Cameron Dicker (87), Graham Gano (65), Brandon McManus (98), Matt Gay (91), for an average of 88.8 points. Our streaming amalgam has either outscored 8 of those kickers (the average of all "great plays") or been tied or outscored by 11 of those kickers (the "top pick"), which is still a very weird split.

Week 13 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.**

Great Plays