Does it make sense to select a kicker before the last rounds? Is it a good idea to instead go after a kicker like Stephen Gostkowski or Steven Hauschka?
I posed a similar question on Sunday, posted some numbers, and a reader mentioned that he would like to see the same data for kickers. I didn’t have time to put it together at that time, but I’ve done it now.
For this study, I didn’t look at individual players. I looked at teams. That way you get out of the results being corrupted by injuries, suspensions, trades and whatnot.
I made the assumption that there are a few kickers each year that pretty much everyone agrees are the guys you should go after. It was Gostkowski, Hauschka and Matt Prater (groan) this year. Those guys all ranked in the top 4 in kicking points last year, and the general feeling was that they’d all be those kind of guys again.
So I worked under the assumption that every year there are about four kickers who are pretty good, and that in general, the guys that people want are the four who scored well the previous year. So I created four blocks of four kickers each. The first block are the top 4 scorers from the previous year (the Gostkowski-Hauschka type of guys). The next four are the guys who ranked 5th thru 8th in the previous season. And in typical fantasy drafts, you can get one of these guys in the final round of your draft. Then there’s the next four (9th thru 12th); you can definitely get one of these guys with your last pick.
Finally, I tossed in the foursome of 13th thru 16th. In most fantasy leagues, one of the guys in that group doesn’t even get selected at all.
Note that at the kicker position, there are some ties – multiple teams will score 114 points in a season. For those, I went with the previous season as the tiebreaker, so I got a 1-32 listing for each year.
Starting with 2002 (the year the league went to 32 teams) here’s how it’s turned out each year:
| KICKING POINTS (YEAR TO YEAR CONSISTENCY) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year | 1-4 | 5-8 | 9-12 | 13-16 |
| 2002 | 110 | 113 | 127 | 113 |
| 2003 | 100 | 102 | 107 | 106 |
| 2004 | 107 | 106 | 120 | 100 |
| 2005 | 114 | 108 | 115 | 94 |
| 2006 | 111 | 114 | 119 | 108 |
| 2007 | 115 | 112 | 101 | 127 |
| 2008 | 126 | 98 | 117 | 115 |
| 2009 | 116 | 111 | 123 | 102 |
| 2010 | 116 | 119 | 114 | 108 |
| 2011 | 117 | 119 | 123 | 132 |
| 2012 | 127 | 123 | 127 | 118 |
| 2013 | 123 | 115 | 128 | 116 |
| Average | 115.0 | 111.6 | 118.4 | 111.4 |
The 1-thru-4 group is the one you would think would have the most points, but it does not. Instead, it’s the third group (9-thru-12) which has tended to score the best. In seven of the 12 years, it finished with the most points of all four of these chunks of kickers. It was better than the top group in two thirds of the years.
Overall, if you were to select an average kicker in the 9-thru-12 group, you would have averaged 118 kicking points over the last 12 years – 3 points more than the elite group. (The teams that ranked 9th to 12th in kicking points last year, by the way, include the Bills, Steelers, Cowboys and Cardinals.)
The other two groups in the study (5-thru-8 and 13-thru-16) both finished around 111-112 points.
If you instead look at groups of eight teams, dividing the league into four pieces of 25 percent each, it turns out this way ...
| KICKING POINTS (YEAR TO YEAR CONSISTENCY) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year | 1-8 | 9-16 | 17-24 | 25-32 |
| 2002 | 111 | 120 | 102 | 87 |
| 2003 | 101 | 106 | 121 | 95 |
| 2004 | 106 | 110 | 98 | 97 |
| 2005 | 111 | 105 | 115 | 101 |
| 2006 | 113 | 113 | 94 | 108 |
| 2007 | 113 | 114 | 104 | 113 |
| 2008 | 112 | 116 | 125 | 110 |
| 2009 | 113 | 113 | 106 | 98 |
| 2010 | 118 | 111 | 109 | 111 |
| 2011 | 118 | 128 | 104 | 115 |
| 2012 | 125 | 122 | 114 | 112 |
| 2013 | 119 | 122 | 125 | 116 |
| Average | 113.3 | 114.9 | 109.6 | 105.1 |
Finally, it can be broken down into individual units. Using that process, it comes out this way …
| KICKING POINTS (12-YEAR AVERAGES) | ||
|---|---|---|
| Slot | Points | Rank |
| 1 | 117.0 | 4 |
| 2 | 119.8 | 2 |
| 3 | 115.8 | 7 |
| 4 | 107.3 | 23 |
| 5 | 108.3 | 20 |
| 6 | 112.9 | 11 |
| 7 | 112.6 | 14 |
| 8 | 112.8 | 13 |
| 9 | 116.0 | 5 |
| 10 | 124.3 | 1 |
| 11 | 117.8 | 3 |
| 12 | 115.6 | 8 |
| 13 | 111.1 | 16 |
| 14 | 112.9 | 12 |
| 15 | 111.6 | 15 |
| 16 | 109.8 | 17 |
| 17 | 107.7 | 21 |
| 18 | 104.4 | 27 |
| 19 | 115.6 | 9 |
| 20 | 115.9 | 6 |
| 21 | 103.3 | 30 |
| 22 | 115.4 | 10 |
| 23 | 106.8 | 24 |
| 24 | 107.7 | 22 |
| 25 | 109.7 | 19 |
| 26 | 106.1 | 25 |
| 27 | 104.2 | 28 |
| 28 | 109.8 | 18 |
| 29 | 103.4 | 29 |
| 30 | 101.6 | 31 |
| 31 | 104.9 | 26 |
| 32 | 101.6 | 32 |
For the individual slots, there is some support for the notion of selecting a Gostkowski-Hauschka kind of kicking prospect. Look at the top 3, and you see them ranking 4th, 2nd and 7th. That is, if every year you selected the kicker who led the league in scoring the previous year, you would have averaged 117 points over the last 12 years. That’s 4th-best, and that’s not bad.
In this final chart, the dropoff starts after the top 3. And note that there’s a nince clump of teams between 9th and 12th. Three teams in the top 5 there, and the other one is 8th.
To me, I think if you go after an elite kicker (a strategy I tend to use) the expectation is you’re going to get about 5 extra points over most of your league over the course a season. But some of those who hold back and settle for seemingly lesser kicking prospects will come up with big producers, and some of the others taking that route will be more likely to have some success by juggling kickers on the waiver wire.
—Ian Allan