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 17 Kicker Results
Every week, we highlight the Top 5 recommendations from our model who are available on waivers in at least 50% of fantasy leagues (per NFL.com roster data). Here's how last week's top options fared.
Evan McPherson (1 FG on 1 attempt, 4 XPs, 7 points)
McPherson connected from 57 yards, but missed an extra point. Fortunately, his team raced to a big lead and didn't resort to 2-point conversions later to try to make up the lost point. Unfortunately, his seven points only tied for 15th in Week 17.
Harrison Mevis (1 FG on 1 attempt, 3 XPs, 6 points)
Heading into Week 15, Mevis was 3 of 3 on field goals and 23 of 23 on extra points; because of his league-low field goal attempt rate, he was the #16 fantasy kicker since taking over the Rams' job. I wrote at the time that I would continue to recommend him for streaming because, historically, the field-goal-to-extra-point ratio tends to regress toward the league average. Since writing that, Mevis has 6 field goals on 7 attempts and 12 extra points on 12 attempts, as the Rams have been right at league average for ratio of field goals to touchdowns. With a more normal scoring mix, Mevis is the #7 fantasy kicker over the last three weeks.
Unfortunately, Mevis' more conventional scoring mix last week came from a smaller scoring base, as the Rams were surprisingly held in check by the Atlanta Falcons. The Rams scored fewer than 37 points for the first time in December, and Mevis finished with just 6 points, tying for 19th among kickers.
Andy Borregales (0 FGs on 1 attempt, 6 XPs, 6 points)
Borregales was close to a strong showing, but the Jets didn't get a single stop on any of New England's first six drives, Borregales hit the upright from 41 yards out on the seventh, and then the Patriots' backups closed out the last two drives of the game. Borregales, like Mevis, finished with 6 points and a share of 19th place for the week.
Eddy Piñeiro (0 FGs on 0 attempts, 6 XPs, 6 points)
San Francisco only reached fourth down three times against the Bears. Two resulted in punts, and on the third, they eschewed a 55-yard field goal attempt to keep the offense on the field. (They converted and went on to score a touchdown.) The result was an extra point barrage and another tie for 19th place on the week.
Wil Lutz (2 FGs on 2 attempts, 2 XPs, 8 points)
Denver closed as 13.5-point favorites against the short-manned Chiefs, but great ball security on Kansas City's part and heavy ball-control on Denver's (the Broncos had four drives of 14 plays or more) resulted in a short, low-scoring game. The Broncos still settled for field goals twice, and Lutz walked out of Week 17 with 8 points, good for an 11th-place fantasy finish.
Final Kicker Results
This season, Rent-a-Kicker made 85 weekly recommendations. Those 85 kickers have averaged 7.56 points. Our top three weekly picks averaged 7.84 points (compared to a long-run average of 7.67). That would rank 7th at the position.
Here were the Top 12 kickers by preseason ADP, along with how many points they scored this season. For any week a kicker didn't play (whether due to injury or bye), I have added six points to account for replacement-level performance.
(Why six? Because if replacement is too generous, players like Tyler Bass or Younghoe Koo, who missed significant time, wind up looking like far better picks than they were. If a kicker stays healthy, the difference between a 6-point replacement and a 7-point replacement is just one point over the course of the season.)
- Brandon Aubrey (156)
- Cameron Dicker (151)
- Jake Bates (128)
- Chris Boswell (121)
- Chase McLaughlin (124)
- Ka'imi Fairbairn (158)
- Harrison Butker (124)
- Jake Elliott (102)
- Cam Little (135)
- Tyler Bass (102)
- Wil Lutz (116)
- Younghoe Koo (91)
The average of all drafted kickers was 126.7 points for the season. The average of our top three weekly recommendations was 133.3 points for the season, nearly half a point more per game. If our streamers were a draft pick, they would have been the 5th-best pick on the board (behind Fairbairn, Aubrey, Dicker, and narrowly behind Little)... but they were completely free.
Long-Term Results
Every year, I like to scout my processes and make sure everything is working fine. Our model has had some exceptionally good (2021, 2024) and bad (2022) seasons, but the long-run average seems to be holding fairly consistent.
Since I started tracking the data more granularly in 2020, the average of our Top 3 weekly picks is 7.71 points per game. The average of all Great plays is 7.91, while the average of all Good plays is 7.49, suggesting the difference between the two categories is about a half point per game in expectation. (The average of all Neutral plays that have made our recommendation list is just 6.10 points per game, but the sample here is tiny; there have been just 20 instances in six years. With a larger sample, I would expect this average to be closer to 7 points.)