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 1 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 Yahoo.com roster data). Here's how last week's top options fared.
Cairo Santos (1 FG on 1 attempt, 8 XPs, 11 points)
Our model tries to identify kickers on high-scoring offenses. One common failure-mode of this is that the kicker's offense scores too many points—specifically, too many touchdowns. It's hard to make a living in fantasy football off of extra points alone. Of course, when you're kicking eight of them in a single week, they still wind up adding up; Santos was the 4th-highest-scoring kicker of Week 1.
Jake Elliott (1 FG on 1 attempt, 3 XPs, 6 points)
Elliott had a pretty average day for an NFL kicker (the fantasy kickers ranked 12-22 last year all averaged between 6 and 7.2 points per game). Normally, 6 points isn't a bad floor. This last week, however, it left Elliott significantly behind all of the model's other recommendations. Elliott finished tied for 21st among kickers.
Tyler Bass (3 FGs on 3 attempts, 3 XPs, 12 points)
The Texans' defense is an intimidating unit... but so is the Bills' offense. In his first game back after missing last year to injury, Bass converted from 46, 34, and 33 and added three extra points. If Buffalo's offense looks this good against great defenses, Bass is going to be a kicker worth holding all season. In Week 1, he ranked 3rd at the position.
Trey Smack (3 FGs on 3 attempts, 1 XP, 10 points)
Smack missed his first extra point attempt, but drilled a 59-yard field goal. Typically, kickers on teams that lose by double digits struggle in fantasy, but the bizarre script in the Green Bay / Minnesota game worked in Smack's favor; Green Bay got out to a 22-10 lead before giving up 29 unanswered points. Smack also converted a 40-yard field goal, but Minnesota was offsides and the Packers elected to take the points off the board, only to get stuffed on the ensuing 4th down. Even without that field goal, Smack scored enough to tie for 7th last week.
Chase McLaughlin (2 FGs on 2 attempts, 3 XP, 9 points)
McLaughlin likely would have scored more if Tampa Bay's offense could have held onto the ball (four fumbles lost), but he still finished with 9 points, which is more than we expect every time we have to go all the way down to the "neutral matchups" section to find an available kicker. He finished the week tied for 9th in fantasy.
Kicker Results To Date
To date, Rent-a-Kicker has made five weekly recommendations. Those five kickers have averaged 9.6 points. Our top three picks averaged 9.67 points— compared to a long-run average of 7.71. That would currently rank 9th at the position, but rankings aren't too meaningful on such small samples. (Last year, only one kicker averaged at least 9.6 points per game.) We'll continue to track averages and ranks over time, and in a few weeks, we'll begin comparing to the Top 12 kickers by preseason ADP.