Sometimes with fantasy football, it’s not who you draft, but who you avoid. That’s how Micah James was able to outperform the other 19 analysts at the kicker position in the Fantasy Index Experts Poll.
James ranked Matt Prater as the No. 1 kicker on this board, which was a mistake. He got suspended for the first four games, underachieved for a while, then was a decent kicker in second half of the season. James (from www.ffmagicman.com) would have been better to fall in with most of the rest of the prognosticators and gone with Stephen Gostkowski.
James also erred in dropping Stephen Hauschka to 13th to Matt Crosby to 9th, which worked against him.
But James made hay in the teens on his draft board. It was in that area where a lot of analysts went with Alex Henery, Greg Zuerlein, Nate Freese and Jay Feely. James left all of those guys off his board entirely, instead tending to go higher on guys like Shaun Suisham, Mike Nugent and Randy Bullock. And those were the picks that helped power James to the top of the heap at this position.
Allen Satterlee of Fantasy Football Warehouse took 2nd, and Mike Clay of Pro Football Focus finished in 3rd.
| EXPERTS POLL -- KICKERS | ||
|---|---|---|
| Rk | Team | Points |
| 1. | Micah James | 35,779 |
| 2. | Alan Satterlee | 35,539 |
| 3. | Mike Clay | 35,367 |
| 4. | Tony Holm | 35,073 |
| 5. | Michael Nazarek | 34,899 |
| 6. | Bryan Hough | 34,781 |
| 7. | David Dorey | 34,419 |
| 8. | Cory Bonini | 33,913 |
| 9. | Bob Henry | 33,909 |
| 10. | Michael Fabiano | 33,849 |
| 11. | Michael Livengood | 33,419 |
| 12. | Sam Hendricks | 33,247 |
| 13. | Scott Sachs | 33,194 |
| 14. | Paul Charchian | 32,778 |
| 15. | L'Roy Anthony Hale | 32,584 |
| 16. | Tom Deskovitz | 32,487 |
| 17. | Scott Pianowski | 32,395 |
| 18. | Chris Liss | 32,375 |
| 19. | Bill Enright | 32,018 |
| 20. | Lenny Pappano | 31,900 |
Picks are graded on a complex scoring matrix. In short, the higher you rank a player, the more he counts towards your score. James, for example, ranked Prater first, so he received 2,100 points for that selection (84 x 25). Had James ranked him 2nd, he would have received 2,016 points (84 x 24). Had he ranked him 3rd, that choice would have been worth 1,932 (84 x 23).
Following that process for all 20 picks by all 20 analysts, James comes out on top.
This kind of system, of course, is heavily influenced by injuries and roster moves. Most notably, the Eagles dumped Alex Henery in August, and he ended up playing in only two games (for Detroit). So everybody who ranked Henery in their top 10 or 12 took a gut punch. That was the driver that helped James win it.
We’ve also experimenting this year with an alternate scoring system, in which you kind of throw such picks out – or at least soften them. In the alternate system, you work under the assumption that whoever you drafted, you’d make waiver moves and end up with at least the 20th-best kicker (who in 2014 was Blair Walsh, with 107 points). So in scoring the poll in the alternate way, we give credit only for points above and beyond 107 points. If a kicker scorers fewer points – 8, 80, 102, whatever – those guys just count for zero. So in that kind of format, experts aren’t as heavily penalized for missing on guys like Alex Henery.
Using the alterate scoring system – “Floor scoring” – Cory Bonini and David Dorey move up from 8th and 7th to the top 2 spots. Bonini is a writer for KFFL, while David Dorey is the long-time senior writer for The Huddle.
| EXPERTS POLL -- KICKERS (Floor scoring) | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Rk | Team | Points | Rank |
| 1. | Cory Bonini | 5,135 | 8 |
| 2. | David Dorey | 5,002 | 7 |
| 3. | Alan Satterlee | 4,813 | 2 |
| 4. | Tony Holm | 4,807 | 4 |
| 5. | Micah James | 4,684 | 1 |
| 6. | Michael Nazarek | 4,650 | 5 |
| 7. | Michael Fabiano | 4,576 | 10 |
| 8. | Mike Clay | 4,530 | 3 |
| 9. | Bob Henry | 4,500 | 9 |
| 10. | Bryan Hough | 4,428 | 6 |
| 11. | Tom Deskovitz | 4,390 | 16 |
| 12. | Scott Sachs | 4,315 | 13 |
| 13. | Bill Enright | 4,314 | 19 |
| 14. | Sam Hendricks | 4,310 | 12 |
| 15. | Paul Charchian | 4,150 | 14 |
| 16. | Michael Livengood | 4,081 | 11 |
| 17. | Scott Pianowski | 4,062 | 17 |
| 18. | Chris Liss | 4,030 | 18 |
| 19. | L'Roy Anthony Hale | 3,880 | 15 |
| 20. | Lenny Pappano | 3,809 | 20 |
—Ian Allan