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 7 Kicker Results
Jake Bates (2 FGs on 2 attempts, 2 XPs, 8 points)
Bates has rarely been available to streamers in recent seasons, but there was an opportunity to snag him after Detroit's bye, one the model was happy to avail itself of. Bates scored 8 points, which tied for 11th among kickers. He shows up as a "Good Play" again this week, and while the model can't use him (since he's now rostered in 70% of leagues again), anyone who streamed their way into him is free to hold on for a little while longer.
Cairo Santos (3 FGs on 4 attempts, 3 XPs, 12 points)
The Bears' offense is significantly more dangerous with Caleb Williams under center, and Santos is one of the biggest beneficiaries. Even with a missed field goal (a 53-yard attempt that bounced off the upright), Santos tied for the highest-scoring kicker of the week.
Brandon McManus (0 FGs on 0 attempts, 5 XPs, 5 points)
A big reason why Rent-a-Kicker's model doesn't care who winds up kicking for the team is that experienced veterans like McManus (a 13-year veteran with over 300 career attempts) are always available to teams that find themselves with a sudden need in the middle of the season. While his Week 7 performance wasn't especially productive as he fell victim to "too many touchdowns" syndrome, McManus remains an experienced kicker on a potent offense and will likely be a Rent-a-Kicker mainstay in the coming weeks. His 5 points last week tied for 17th at the position.
Trey Smack (1 FG on 3 attempts, 2 XPs, 5 points)
The model was right about the fundamentals—had Smack made his kicks, he'd have scored 11 points and finished tied for 4th on the week—but Smack missed one kick from 26 yards and had a 35-yard attempt blocked. Smack has been the worst kicker in the league through seven weeks (in terms of field goals vs. distance-adjusted expectations), and while these small-sample deviations are often just randomness, they also often result in kickers losing their jobs. Green Bay has publicly committed to sticking with Smack for now, but the leash has to be growing shorter. With 5 points, Smack tied for 17th among kickers.
Chris Boswell (3 FGs on 3 attempts, 1 XP, 10 points)
Boswell was originally drafted as the 11th kicker off the board by ADP, but was cut by disgruntled managers after poor early-season production (he ranked 21st through the first month of the season). Their impatience is our benefit; Boswell is the 2nd-best kicker over the last two weeks, and we were able to add and use him in a favorable matchup. His 10 points tied for 6th at the position last week.
Kicker Results to Date
To date, Rent-a-Kicker has made 35 weekly recommendations. Those 35 kickers have averaged 7.69 points. Our Top 3 picks average 7.38 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 (53), Ka'imi Fairbairn (61), Cameron Dicker (42), Jason Myers (58), Cam Little (52), Jake Bates (58), Eddy Piñeiro (39), Harrison Butker (53), Tyler Loop (53), Andy Borregales (44), Chris Boswell (61), and Chase McLaughlin (64). (All kickers receive 6 points for each week they don't play to represent replacement performance.)
Those 12 kickers average 53.2 points, while an amalgamation of our Top 3 weekly recommendations averages 51.7, an advantage of around 0.2 points per game for the drafted kickers. Nine of the Top 12 kickers by ADP are outperforming our streamers, while three are underperforming—although four of the overperformers are at either 52 or 53 points, so the margins are extremely tight.
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.
(As an aside, the correlation between draft order and production to date among the Top 12 kickers is just 0.15, which means draft order explains just 2% of the variance in production, and the slight relationship that exists runs the wrong way: later-drafted kickers scored more. Three drafted kickers have topped 60 points so far: the #2, #11, and #12 players selected. Just to reinforce how unpredictable production at this position really is.)