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 Kicker Results

Jake Bates (1 FG on 1 attempt, 7 XPs, 10 points)

Some kicker models aim to find offenses that will do well, but not too well-- regularly crossing midfield only to stall out in field goal range. Historically, I have found that "how often an offense reaches scoring range" is predictable but "how often an offense stalls out once there" is not, so we aim to maximize scoring opportunities of any type and minimize the sort of risks that alter behavior and kill fantasy production (such as getting blown out, which leads to teams going for it on 4th down in what would otherwise be field goal range). This occasionally leads to picking offenses that score "too many" touchdowns. (Eight scoring drives are worth less to a kicker than three scoring drives if the former are all touchdowns and the latter are all field goals.)

The consolation, of course, is that the "downside" to this approach is still quite good; extra points still add up when you're kicking seven of them. The downside to the "find an offense that stalls out in field goal range" approach is sometimes you wind up with an offense that stalls out just short of field goal range and score nothing. Jake Bates still reached double digits and finished 9th among kickers in Week 8.

Wil Lutz (0 FGs on 0 attempts, 4 XPs, 4 points)

The real downside, of course, comes in games where an offense predicted to have a massive day instead merely has a "good" day. Denver scored four touchdowns against Carolina and coasted in a game that wasn't as close as the final score would suggest. Lutz finished with just 4 points, ranking 26th for the week.

Brandon McManus (3 FGs on 3 attempts, 3 XPs, 12 points)

McManus is the classic example of why it's generally not worth drafting a kicker in preseason. Three weeks ago he was a free agent. Since joining the Packers, he's been the 8th-best kicker for fantasy (bolstered by back-to-back game-winning FGs). In Week 8, he tied for 3rd.

Greg Zuerlein (1 FG on 2 attempts, 1 XP, 4 points)

Zuerlein had the potential for a much bigger afternoon, but he missed an extra point early, which prompted his team to attempt a 2-point conversion to "make up" the point later, and he also missed a 44-yard field goal attempt. Zuerlein historically makes 80% of kicks from that range, but he's just 1 of 4 for the season (and has also missed his lone attempt from 50+). A concerning sign? Possibly, though it's just as likely to be statistical noise. (Noise or not, this kind of cold stretch can be troubling for a kicker's long-term employment prospects, especially when it comes in games like this where his team ultimately lost by 3.) As it is, Zuerlein scored 4 points, tying for 26th among 32 kickers.

Anders Carlson (3 FGs on 3 attempts, 3 XPs, 12 points)

Carlson, like McManus, is a great argument against drafting kickers. You can spend a mid-round draft pick to land a kicker on a top offense... or you can just wait until injuries and underperformance open up some jobs at midseason and add one for free.

Are the kickers who join teams at midseason worse than the ones with a job to start the year? Not really; Carlson has an 84% field goal rate in his two seasons and has converted 5 of his 7 career attempts from 50+ yards. His attempts this week came from 41, 44, and 50 yards-- hardly chip shots. He finished the week tied for 3rd.

Kicker Results To Date

To date, Rent-a-Kicker has made 40 weekly recommendations. Those 40 kickers have averaged 7.48 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 14th at the position. Our top three picks average 8.50 points, which would tie for 5th.

Managers selecting randomly each week from among our top three picks would have 68 points so far. The Top 12 kickers by preseason ADP were Justin Tucker (68), Brandon Aubrey (72), Harrison Butker (65), Jake Elliott (51), Ka'imi Fairbairn (74), Younghoe Koo (66), Jake Moody (63), Evan McPherson (53), Cameron Dicker (66), Jason Sanders (49), Tyler Bass (62), and Jason Myers (56) (giving each kicker 6 points for every game missed to account for the typical historical replacement value).

Only 2 of the Top 12 kickers by preseason ADP are outscoring our top three weekly picks. A third-- Justin Tucker, the first kicker off the board-- has tied our average. On average, drafted kickers have scored 7.8 points, about 0.7 points per game less than our streaming recommendations. 

Week 9 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.