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 9 Kicker Results

Eddy Piñeiro (1 FG on 1 attempt, 5 XPs, 8 points)

The 49ers mounted six scoring drives against the overmatched Raiders. It would have been nice if one or two more of them had stalled out in field goal range, as 8 points only tied Piñeiro for 17th in a high-scoring week for kickers.

Harrison Butker (0 FGs on 1 attempt, 5 XPs, 5 points)

Butker's one miss this week was actually two; he hit the upright from 56 yards, but an offsides penalty gave him a second chance, only for Butker to miss again. The last two weeks, I've been writing about how Trey Smack was the worst kicker in the league so far this season. 50+ yard attempts are hardly chip shots, but after Smack made all his kicks this week, Butker's misses make him the new leader in field goals below expectation. It's quite the fall for a kicker who I once heralded as one of the few who were meaningfully better than league average. With 5 points, Butker tied for 22nd in Week 10.

Cairo Santos (2 FGs on 2 attempts, 3 XPs, 9 points)

The Bears' offense had 210 yards on 35 plays in the first half, but things went downhill from there; they had 22 yards on 19 plays over their first six drives after halftime before finally mounting a game-winning field goal drive as time expired. Santos still finished with 9 points for the day, which tied him for 14th among kickers.

Nick Folk (1 FG on 2 attempts, 2 XPs, 5 points)

Folk led the league in FG% in each of the last three seasons, but this week, he missed an easy 38-yard attempt against the Bengals. The Falcons averaged 31 points per game in Penix's first five starts of the year, but just 8.5 over the last two. Folk was cut but would have fallen out of our weekly rotation until the Falcons show signs of righting the ship.

Tyler Bass (3 FGs on 3 attempts, 2 XPs, 11 points)

Bass is finally rostered in more than 50% of leagues, which means we likely won't have a chance to use him again this season (unless you've been holding him since Week 2, when I first suggested it—in which case, continue to do so). We'll miss having him around, because he's been the best kicker in fantasy football to this point. His 11 points tied for 7th in Week 9.

Kicker Results to Date

To date, Rent-a-Kicker has made 45 weekly recommendations. Those 45 kickers have averaged 7.53 points. Our Top 3 picks average 7.41 points—compared to a long-run average of 7.71. That Top 3 average would rank 17th 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 (74), Ka'imi Fairbairn (81), Cameron Dicker (61), Jason Myers (66), Cam Little (73), Jake Bates (78), Eddy Piñeiro (53), Harrison Butker (64), Tyler Loop (63), Andy Borregales (53), Chris Boswell (76), and Chase McLaughlin (84). (All kickers receive 6 points for each week they don't play to represent replacement performance.)

Those 12 kickers average 68.8 points, while an amalgamation of our Top 3 weekly recommendations averages 66.7, an advantage of about a quarter point 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.

Because of strong showings from the top kickers by ADP, the correlation between draft position and production is no longer positive, which means later-drafted kickers are no longer outscoring their early-drafted peers. The current correlation is -0.07, which means draft position explains about 0.5% of the variation in production to date.

Week 10 Kicker Situations

Here is how each matchup scores based on Vegas projected totals and stadium, along with the expected kicker for each team. The Top 5 players who are available in over 50% of leagues based on Yahoo.com roster percentages are italicized and will be discussed in next week's column. The Top 3 highlighted players will be included in our running average. Also, note that these rankings specifically apply to situations; teams will occasionally change kickers mid-week, but any endorsements apply equally to whatever kicker eventually winds up getting the start.