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 6 Kicker Results
Blake Grupe (1 FG on 1 attempt, 0 XPs, 3 points)
When Rent-a-Kicker published last week, the Rams' kicker was Harrison Mevis. Mevis was cut, and Grupe was signed to replace him, but that's fine, because if a team changes kickers mid-week, we simply use the new kicker instead. If a team changes kickers mid-game, however, we're out of luck. Grupe hit a 44-yard field goal in the first quarter, then tore his ACL making a tackle on the subsequent kickoff. There were at least five more points available had Grupe stayed healthy: two extra points after a touchdown and a potential 45-yard field goal that the Rams eschewed, going for it on 4th down. As it is, his three points ranked 25th out of 28 kickers.
Eddy Piñeiro (1 FG on 1 attempt, 2 XPs, 5 points)
Piñeiro missed an extra point, and the San Francisco offense as a whole ground to a halt after an injury to Mike Evans. With just five points, Piñeiro tied for the 21st-best fantasy kicker of the week.
Tyler Bass (4 FGs on 4 attempts, 3 XPs, 15 points)
After Week 1, I identified Bass as a potential long-term option, writing, "If Buffalo's offense looks this good against great defenses, Bass is going to be a kicker worth holding all season." Bass is the second-highest-scoring kicker in fantasy football so far, but remains rostered in just 43% of leagues. He's on bye this week, which likely gives you one last chance to get him if you want him (provided it isn't already too late). With 15 points, he was the second-best kicker in fantasy last week.
Cairo Santos (1 FG on 2 attempts, 4 XPs, 7 points)
Santos' lone miss was from 56 yards, not the type of play kickers get fired for (though I'll admit I was surprised to see the Rams part ways with Harrison Mevis last week after what I thought was a fairly normal start to the season). With Caleb Williams back, Chicago's offense once again looks potent, and Santos will likely have more weeks as a Rent-a-Kicker recommendation. (Including, as it turns out, this week.) His 7 points tied for 14th last week.
Andy Borregales (2 FGs on 2 attempts, 2 XPs, 8 points)
The Patriots' offense hasn't been as potent as it was last year, and Borregales' production has been a casualty of that decline; he was the 10th kicker off the board in drafts, but ranks 24th at the position through six weeks. That just means he's finding his way onto waivers in more and more leagues, which makes him available to us when the matchup is favorable. Last week against the Jets, he scored 8 points (and was a missed extra point away from a 9th), which tied for 12th place at the position.
Kicker Results to Date
To date, Rent-a-Kicker has made 30 weekly recommendations. Those 30 kickers have averaged 7.63 points. Our Top 3 picks average 7.22 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 (41), Ka'imi Fairbairn (54), Cameron Dicker (36), Jason Myers (50), Cam Little (46), Jake Bates (50), Eddy Piñeiro (37), Harrison Butker (50), Tyler Loop (46), Andy Borregales (38), Chris Boswell (51), and Chase McLaughlin (53). (All kickers receive 6 points for each week they don't play to represent replacement performance.)
Those 12 kickers average 46 points, while an amalgamation of our Top 3 weekly recommendations averages 43.3, an advantage of nearly a half point per game for the drafted kickers. Eight of the Top 12 kickers by ADP are outperforming our streamers, while four are underperforming.
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.