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 kicker's own talent) to help you find perfectly startable production off the waiver wire.
Week 4 Kicker Results
Tyler Bass (2 FGs on 2 attempts, 2 XPs, 8 points)
Bass lost out on an opportunity for a third extra point as the Bills elected to go for 2 points late. (The decision was especially consequential for Bass, as the missed 2-point attempt allowed the Patriots to win the game in regulation with a field goal, rather than merely sending it to overtime where Bass could have added some more attempts.) Bass' 8 points tied for the 13th-highest total of the week.
Daniel Carlson (1 FG on 2 attempts, 3 XPs, 6 points)
Carlson missed an attempt from 52 yards early, and missed out on the opportunity for a 33-yarder late as the Saints elected to go for it on 4th-and-short. (This tendency for teams trailing by a lot to stop kicking field goals late is why the model tries to avoid big underdogs where possible, but the Saints were favored for the week.) Carlson's 6 points tied for 17th among kickers.
Nick Folk (1 FG on 1 attempt, 6 XPs, 9 points)
Folk lined up across the field from Carlson, and his team didn't attempt many field goals for the opposite reason: they were too busy scoring touchdowns. As we always say, extra points aren't worth much, but if you score enough of them, they still add up; with 9 points, Folk was the 11th-best kicker last week.
Spencer Shrader (3 FGs on 3 attempts, 3 XPs, 12 points)
The Colts hit the "Goldilocks zone" against the Commanders: they moved the ball well, but they still stalled out enough to score field goals rather than touchdowns. Shrader converted from 48, 52, and 44 yards, and his 12 points tied for 4th-best at the position.
Ryan Fitzgerald (2 FGs on 2 attempts, 2 XPs, 8 points)
Fitzgerald converted field goals of 47 and 33 yards but missed two extra-point attempts to the right, giving him three such misses so far this season. The Panthers are surprisingly 4th in the league in scoring and could create strong production opportunities all year... but if Fitzgerald doesn't clean things up, a different kicker might be the one to benefit.
Kicker Results to Date
To date, Rent-a-Kicker has made twenty weekly recommendations. Those twenty kickers have averaged 7.65 points. Our Top 3 picks average 7.42 points—compared to a long-run average of 7.71. That Top 3 average would rank just 18th at the position. Would you have been better off drafting a kicker?
Here are the Top 12 kickers by preseason ADP, along with their points so far: Brandon Aubrey (36), Ka'imi Fairbairn (30), Cameron Dicker (25), Jason Myers (27), Cam Little (32), Jake Bates (35), Eddy Piñeiro (26), Harrison Butker (34), Tyler Loop (32), Andy Borregales (21), Chris Boswell (27), and Chase McLaughlin (34). (In the future, I will award each kicker six points for every game they miss to represent the replacement level, but it isn't necessary at this point.)
Those 12 kickers average 29.9 points, while an amalgamation of our Top 3 weekly recommendations averages 29.7, a difference of a few hundredths of a point per game. You could have gotten lucky and landed on Aubrey (36 points) or Bates (35), but on the other hand, you could have gotten lucky and landed our top pick for each week (40 points). Luck is great (when you have it), but it can't be counted on long-term, which is why we focus on average results.
The model is running a little behind expectations to this point, but even so, it has essentially matched traditional strategies despite not spending a single resource on the position, relying entirely on players who the other teams in your league don't want.