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 8 Kicker Results
Evan McPherson (0 FGs on 0 attempts, 5 XPs, 5 points)
The model tries its best to identify kickers on teams that will win comfortably to avoid situations where, say, the offense goes for it on 4th down in the red zone or attempts a 2-point conversion after a touchdown while trying to mount a comeback (two things that happened to McPherson last Sunday). Part of the explanation for our model's early struggles is that this has been the worst season in at least 40 years for big favorites.
Teams favored by 7+ points have covered the spread less than 25% of the time through Week 8, and the Bengals/Titans game is merely one of the latest examples. The 1-6 Titans showed more life than they've demonstrated so far this season and pushed the Bengals to the brink, and managers with McPherson had to content themselves with 5 extra points and a 21st-place weekly finish.
While short-run deviations are not unusual, Vegas is self-correcting, so we should expect performance from heavy favorites to revert to their long-run averages going forward.
Andy Borregales (1 FG on 2 attempts, 3 XPs, 6 points)
Borregales has struggled in his sophomore campaign and suddenly finds himself on thin ice. His miss last week came from just 40 yards, a distance that should be routine for modern kickers. His 6 points tied for 16th in Week 8.
Tyler Bass (3 FGs on 3 attempts, 3 XPs, 12 points)
After Week 1, I wrote, "If Buffalo's offense looks this good against great defenses, Bass is going to be a kicker worth holding all season." After yet another big week, he ranks 6th in total points this season, but that's misleading because he's the only player in the Top 9 who has already had his bye. If you give an additional six points to account for his bye-week replacement (as is standard practice around here), he's been the best kicker in fantasy this season. In Week 8, he converted three field goals (including a pair of 50+ yarders) and finished third among all fantasy kickers.
Brandon McManus (1 FG on 1 attempt, 3 XPs, 6 points)
In today's NFL, 24 points from an offense is about par (over the last three seasons, teams average 23 points per game), and the most common way to get there is three touchdowns and a field goal. For that reason, I consider the 1 FG / 3 XP game to essentially be "par" for fantasy kickers, and it typically ranks right around the median for any given week. Last week, for instance, McManus' "par" game tied for 16th among the 28 active kickers.
Trey Smack (0 FGs on 0 attempts, 3 XPs, 3 points)
Last week, I wrote, "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." Week 8 did not help his cause, as he hit the upright on one of his four extra point attempts. He's now 10 percentage points below league average on extra points (84% compared to 94% league-wide) and 15 below on placekicks (69% vs. 84%). The Packers have once again publicly committed to Smack, but I wonder how much longer they can stick with him. With 3 points, Smack tied for 24th last week.
Kicker Results to Date
To date, Rent-a-Kicker has made 40 weekly recommendations. Those 40 kickers have averaged 7.53 points. Our Top 3 picks average 7.42 points—compared to a long-run average of 7.71. That Top 3 average would rank 15th 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 (65), Ka'imi Fairbairn (67), Cameron Dicker (51), Jason Myers (61), Cam Little (58), Jake Bates (65), Eddy Piñeiro (45), Harrison Butker (59), Tyler Loop (57), Andy Borregales (50), Chris Boswell (70), and Chase McLaughlin (74). (All kickers receive 6 points for each week they don't play to represent replacement performance.)
Those 12 kickers average 60.2 points, while an amalgamation of our Top 3 weekly recommendations averages 59.3, an advantage of around 0.1 points per game for the drafted kickers. After a rough start, our streamers have clawed their way back and are now outperforming half of the Top 12 kickers by preseason ADP.
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.
Note that the highest-scoring kickers among the Top 12 drafted are the ones taken 11th and 12th. The correlation between draft order and production remains extraordinarily weak (meaning draft order tells us very little about production) and positive (meaning later kickers are slightly outproducing earlier ones). This fundamental unpredictability of kickers is one of the most compelling reasons to spend as few resources at the position as you can get away with.