Photo: USA Today Sports

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 15 Results

Jake Moody (1 FG attempt, 1 FG, 6 XPs, 9 points)

Excluding the end of each half, San Francisco had eight possessions and scored on seven of them. There could have been a more useful mix of scores than "six touchdowns and one field goal", but the offense is firing on all cylinders right now and Jake Moody's 9 points was enough to tie him for 7th last week.

Lucas Havrisik (3 FG attempts, 2 FGs, 2 XPs, 8 points)

It can be nerve-wracking trusting your fantasy playoff hopes to a kicker whose jersey number (8) is still higher than his career games played (7), but as I always say, kicker scoring belongs to the offense. Havrisik missed from 43 yards, but the Rams consistently put him into position and his 8 points tied for 12th.

Michael Badgley (0 FG attempts, 0 FGs, 6 XPs, 6 points)

Badgley gives us yet another "nothing but extra points" game this season, which is a natural consequence of hunting the kickers with the best offensive matchups. The bright side is even extra points can add up if you get enough of them; Badgley's 6 points still ranked 17th for the week, which isn't a terrible failure mode.

Jason Sanders (3 FG attempts, 3 FGs, 3 XPs, 12 points)

Sanders represents the upside of targeting great matchups. The Dolphins dominated the Jets on Sunday, scoring on six of their first eight drives before taking their foot off the gas with a 30-0 lead, but enough of those drives stalled out that Sanders finished with 12 points instead of Badgley's 6. Sanders was the 2nd-best kicker on the week.

Matt Gay (5 FG attempts, 3 FGs, 3 XPs, 12 points)

Gay had the chance for a truly inspired performance during the fantasy playoffs but missed from 43 and 56 yards. Even with that, he had so many opportunities that he still put up 12 points, tied with Sanders for the 2nd-best performance of the week.

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): Justin Tucker, Tyler Bass, Jake Elliott, Jason Sanders, Brandon Aubrey, and Jake Moody. The Lions' up-and-down offensive efforts in recent weeks move Patterson off of this list.

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 75 weekly recommendations. Those 70 kickers have averaged 7.61 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 6.67 points per game, while all recommended "great plays" average 7.81. The former figure would rank 19th; the latter figure would rank 5th.

If you've been following along, you should expect to have scored between 100 (the average of our top picks) and 117.1 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 (126), Daniel Carlson (93), Harrison Butker (115), Tyler Bass (109), Evan McPherson (109), Younghoe Koo (102), Jason Meyers (118), Jake Elliott (115), Cameron Dicker (97), Graham Gano (83), Brandon McManus (109), Matt Gay (116), for an average of 107.7 points. Our streaming amalgam has either outscored 10 of those kickers (the average of all "great plays") or been tied or outscored by 9 of those kickers (the "top pick"), which is still a very weird split.

Week 16 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