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 5 Kicker Results

Jason Myers (2 FGs on 3 attempts, 2 XPs, 8 points)

Myers had a respectable day that was almost great; with 45 seconds left, Myers lined up for a game-tying kick from 47 yards, a distance where he historically converts around 85% of the time. A make would have brought his total to 11 points with the chance to add more in overtime; instead, the Giants leapt the line of scrimmage, blocked the kick, and returned it for a defensive touchdown to ice the game. Myers' 8 points finished 14th among kickers.

Brayden Narveson (1 FG on 1 attempt, 3 XPs, 6 points)

Narveson has been the most inaccurate kicker in the league this year, but our model treats accuracy over a small sample as predominantly noise, so Narveson was a top recommendation on a Green Bay offense that was expected to score at will against the Rams after putting up 29 points against a far tougher Minnesota Vikings defense. Narveson hit from 46 yards, which was nice to see since he had previously only been 3 of 6 from the distance, but the offensive explosion didn't manifest and he finished with just 6 points overall, tied for 19th in Week 5.

Cam Little (3 FGs on 3 attempts, 4 XPs, 13 points)

My favorite part of streaming kickers is finding off-the-radar names in a good matchup. Little was the 26th-ranked kicker through four weeks and Jacksonville was the last winless team, but Little became a recommended play in a good spot and rewarded anyone willing to take a chance on him with 13 points (including the game-winner), the second-highest total of the week.

Evan McPherson (0 FGs on 1 attempt, 4 XPs, 4 points)

It was a fairly thin week for streaming kickers; this was just the fifth time in the last five years that there were only three widely-available kickers that scored above a "neutral play" (and the first week at least one of the kickers didn't qualify as a "great play"). As a result, the McPherson recommendation was more due to a lack of alternatives. The Bengals offense outperformed expectations, scoring five touchdowns on the day, but it went for a 2-point conversion after one touchdown and McPherson missed a 53-yard game-winner in overtime, leaving him tied for 23rd out of 28 possible starters with just 4 extra points.

Cairo Santos (1 FG on 1 attempt, 3 XPs, 6 points)

Santos was another recommendation of necessity whose team outperformed expectations. Against the hapless Panthers, the Bears topped 35 points for just the third time in the last four seasons. Santos did miss an extra point and then the team attempted a two-point conversion late to get that point back, resulting in only six points for the kicker, which tied for 19th.

A Note on Bookkeeping

I always like to be as transparent as possible about my model and its results over time, so I want to talk about the model categories (Great Plays, Good Play, Neutral Play, Poor Play, and Avoid). These categories were established based on a specific scoring environment, but scoring environment can vary quite substantially from season to season, which can have a fairly significant impact.

In Week 4, we had to recommend a "Neutral" kicker because we didn't have five qualifiers among the "Great" and "Good" categories; this was the earliest in the year that's ever happened, and the first time in a week where no teams were on bye and no teams were resting starters. In fact, we went the entire 2020 and 2021 season without making it to the "neutral" category a single time.

Last week was just the fifth week we recommended two neutral kickers in the same week, and the first of those five weeks that we didn't have any "great" kickers to offset. Week 3 this season tied the model's record for fewest kickers (freely available or otherwise) qualifying as "great plays" with three. Week 4 broke that record with only two "great plays". Week 5 broke it again with just one qualifier.

So far this year, there have only been six kickers to date who were a "great play" and were available in 50% of leagues. To this point over the previous four seasons, that total was 14, 14, 18, and 15. We've had nine "Good plays" among our Top 3 weekly recommendations, nearly two per week. In the entire 2021 season, we only had six such instances. In 2020, there were only two.

Further, tracking production by category creates some weird results. If we have four great plays in one week and they each score 10 points, then we have one great play in the next week and he scores 5 points, we've recommended 5 kickers in the category and they've scored 45 points. I could say "Anyone picking our great plays at random is averaging 9 points per game"-- but that's not true. Anyone doing that would have scored 10 points in one week and 5 points in the next for an average of 7.5 points.

Because of these issues, I'm changing how we track and measure success. I will continue to highlight the top five widely-available kickers every week and I will internally track performance by category to ensure the model remains well-calibrated. But when reporting results, I will focus on the performance of our "top picks", which will be the three highest-rated kickers who were widely available for the week, regardless of what category they happened to be in.

Please note that the model itself isn't changing. It's designed to rank the kickers based on how likely they are to score lots of points (and just as importantly, how likely they are to avoid scoring very few points). It still does that, even if what qualifies as "a lot of points" or "very few points" is shifting over time.

I'm merely changing how I'm reporting the results in a way that I think will better match the real-world experience of anyone following along at home, and I wanted to be transparent about the reasons for that change because, for something as potentially scary and unintuitive as weekly streaming, trust is important.

Kicker Results To Date

To date, Rent-a-Kicker has made 25 weekly recommendations. Those 25 kickers have averaged 6.52 points, compared to 7.75 in 2023, 6.82 in 2022, 8.45 in 2021, 7.39 in 2020, and 7.39 in 2019. That average would currently rank just 20th at the position. Our "top picks" (see the section above) average 7.60 points, which would rank 15th.

Anyone selecting at random from among our top picks would have 38 points so far. The Top 12 kickers by preseason ADP were Justin Tucker (39), Brandon Aubrey (51), Harrison Butker (46), Jake Elliott (26), Ka'imi Fairbairn (42), Younghoe Koo (45), Jake Moody (51), Evan McPherson (40), Cameron Dicker (32), Jason Sanders (30), Tyler Bass (40), and Jason Myers (36) (giving each kicker 6 points for every game missed to account for the typical historical replacement value).

Eight out of twelve picks have outperformed our streamers, though results are fairly tightly clustered still. On average, drafted kickers have scored 39.8 points, a 0.4-point-per-game advantage over our streaming recommendations.

Week 6 Kicker 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.