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 5 Kicker Results
Harrison Mevis (0 FGs on 2 attempts, 4 XPs, 4 points)
The missed field goals were a bit of a rough break from our top pick. Neither of them was egregious; Mevis missed a 50-yarder on the Rams' first possession and had a 48-yarder blocked on their last possession. Defensible or not, those kicks wound up being the difference between a double-digit scoring week and what we got—four points and a tie for 24th among kickers. Mevis got released by the Rams.
Tyler Bass (3 FGs on 3 attempts, 2 XPs, 11 points)
Bass missed an extra point, but otherwise came through on a day where his offense put together an ideal mix of moving the football and stalling out. Three of Bass' eleven points came on the game-winning kick in overtime. Bass tied for 4th in Week 5.
Chad Ryland (0 FGs on 1 attempt, 3 XPs, 3 points)
Ryland's Cardinals were a 5.5-point underdog, which meant he was a bit of a risky pick, but he was playing in a projected shootout in a dome, so the model took a chance. Unfortunately, the game script got away from the Cardinals, who trailed by 17 at halftime and fell further behind in the second half. Ryland missed a 53-yarder, and Arizona kept the offense on the field on 4th down in the red zone three times, costing him more opportunities. His 3 points tied for 27th on the week.
Andy Borregales (1 FG on 1 attempt, 6 XPs, 9 points)
Most managers' approach to the kicker position is to grab whoever has scored the most points so far. Our model doesn't even consider past production; Borregales' 21 points through four weeks tied for 30th among 32 kickers. With the Patriots' offense waking up from its early-season slumber, the model flagged him as a solid bet, and he delivered; New England was the highest-scoring team of the week, and Borregales' 9 points tied for 10th.
Nick Folk (3 FGs on 3 attempts, 2 XPs, 11 points)
Another player who is underrated by backward-looking analysis—Nick Folk's Falcons look like a completely different team on offense since Michael Penix Jr. returned to the lineup. Folk was a Bottom 3 kicker through two weeks with Cooper Rush under center (though some of this was owed to a few uncharacteristic early misses), but he's tied for 7th in the three weeks since, and his eleven points tied him for the 4th-best score last week.
Kicker Results to Date
To date, Rent-a-Kicker has made 25 weekly recommendations. Those 25 kickers have averaged 7.64 points. Our Top 3 picks average 7.13 points—compared to a long-run average of 7.71. That Top 3 average would rank just 19th 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 (40), Ka'imi Fairbairn (44), Cameron Dicker (30), Jason Myers (44), Cam Little (39), Jake Bates (44), Eddy Piñeiro (32), Harrison Butker (40), Tyler Loop (42), Andy Borregales (30), Chris Boswell (37), and Chase McLaughlin (40). (All kickers receive 6 points for each week they don't play to represent replacement performance.)
Those 12 kickers average 38.5 points, while an amalgamation of our Top 3 weekly recommendations averages 35.7, an advantage of more than half a point per game for the drafted kickers. Nine of the Top 12 kickers by ADP are outperforming our streamers, while three are underperforming.
This is the worst our model has been doing at this point of the season. To some extent, this is a fluke of ADP; highly drafted kickers have been overrepresented among the weekly top picks this year (compared to usual), which means a lot of the best options haven't been available to us. So far this year we have only been able to recommend 4 streaming options that were "great plays", and we've had to resort to 4 that were "neutral plays". For comparison, through five weeks in 2025 we'd recommended 10 "great plays" vs. 2 "neutral plays". In 2024, this was 6 "great plays" vs. 3 "neutral plays".
I'm not concerned about the pattern because in past seasons, there's been little correlation between the availability of "great plays" early and late in the year. In 2024, for example, we had 1.2 great plays per week through the first five, but that rose to 2.4 great plays per week for the rest of the season; our Top 3 streamers went from 7.6 points per game through five weeks to 8.7 the rest of the way. Indeed, you'll see that already this week, 4 out of 5 "Great Plays" are available on waivers in over 50% of leagues, doubling our total for the season.
Whenever our model is doing especially well, I always try to stress that nothing has fundamentally changed; we've just been lucky. Likewise, when our model is doing poorly, hopefully I've built up enough credibility to say we've just been unlucky. Going forward, I'd expect our streamers to score right around our long-term average (about 7.7 points per game) and outperform the majority of drafted kickers.