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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 talent of the kicker himself) to help you find perfectly startable production off the waiver wire.

Week 9 Results

Jake Elliott (1 FG attempt, 0 FGs, 3 XPs, 3 points)

Aaaand... Jake Elliott suffered from "Too Many Touchdowns Syndrome" once again, with the Eagles scoring four touchdowns against just one field goal attempt (a 54-yarder that Elliott missed). Adding insult to injury, the Eagles attempted a 2-point conversion after their last touchdown to go up by... 12 points instead of 11? Alas. With just 3 points, Elliott ranked 21st on the week.

Harrison Butker (3 FG attempts, 2 FGs, 0 XPs, 6 points)

Butker missed an extra point attempt and another field goal attempt from 47 yards. This is largely just a bad break; no kicker is as anywhere near as good as Justin Tucker, but Butker is likely one of the Top 5 kickers in the league. His 6 points ranked 12th on the week, but brighter days are ahead. And as a reminder: if you were lucky enough to grab Butker when he was available because of his injury or his bye, strongly consider just keeping him and playing him every week going forward.

Cameron Dicker (2 FG attempts, 2 FGs, 2 XPs, 8 points)

Dustin Hopkins continues to recover from an injured hamstring, but as always, our recommendations are by team and not player, and it's a good thing because Dicker's 8 points were the 5th-highest in an overall underwhelming week for the position.

Matt Prater (0 FG attempts, 0 FGs, 3 XPs, 3 points)

Last year the Cardinals showed a bizarre willingness to let Prater attempt long field goals; last week, they passed up a 57-yarder to go for it on 4th-and-4. Strategically, it was the better decision, but I do miss the small boost to Prater's upside knowing his coach would let him kick from virtually any distance. Instead, between that 4th-down attempt and a later one when trailing by seven, Prater didn't attempt a field goal all game and finished with just 3 points, tied for 21st.

Jason Sanders (1 FG attempt, 0 FGs, 5 XPs, 5 points)

Sanders missed an easy 29-yarder that would have resulted in a pretty strong day overall. Nevertheless, if Miami's offense is going to keep scoring like this, I'm sure we'll see his name on this list plenty in the coming weeks. As it stands, his five points ranked 15th among kickers.

Thoughts on What's Going On So Far

If you've been following along this year, you certainly don't need another reminder of how weird the season has been and how poorly our model has fared. As I keep mentioning, the model has been the model for years, so it's not as if it's suddenly broken. But I continue to investigate what's behind the poor performance, and I believe I have a qualified answer. Of sorts.

Last year, kickers made 874 field goals against 1174 extra points, which means that 42.67% of all successful kicks were field goals. This year offenses have been struggling, and that shows up in the kicking data; kickers have made 402 field goals against 509 extra points, meaning 44.13% of all successful kicks have been field goals.

Rent-a-Kicker has seen no such bump, however. Our 40 recommendations to date have made 54 field goals against 97 extra points, meaning just 35.76% of all kicks have been field goals. If our recommendations had the same number of successful kicks but were kicking field goals at the league average rate, our average would rise from 6.48 points per game to 7.11 points per game.

But the problem is actually more acute than that. The highlighted "Good Plays" have 32 field goals against 45 extra points, a field goal rate of 41.56%, and that's not too far off of the league average. Which is perhaps why our "Good Plays" are scoring right in line with their 2020/2019 averages-- 6.71 points per game so far this year vs. 6.74 points per game in 2020. (2021 was, as I noted at the time, a massive positive outlier for our model, with kickers from all categories scoring north of 8 points per game.)

But our "Great Plays" so far? After this week's catastrophic showing, they've converted 22 field goals against 52 extra points, a rate of just 29.73%. If our great plays were performing on par with league average here, their per-game average would rise from 6.21 to 7.33 (compared to 7.59 in 2020), or e

Results To Date

To date, Rent-a-Kicker has made 45 weekly recommendations. Those 45 kickers have averaged 6.31 points, compared to 8.45 in 2021, 7.39 in 2020, 7.65 in 2019, and 7.43 in 2018. That average would currently rank just 19th at the position (after giving 6 points to every kicker who has had their bye week already). Our top weekly recommendation averages just 5.22 points, and every highlighted kicker with a great matchup averages 6.14, marks that would rank 25thth and 20th.

Here are the Top 12 kickers by preseason ADP along with how many points they've scored to date in parentheses: Justin Tucker (79), Tyler Bass (68), Matt Gay (53), Harrison Butker (57*), Daniel Carlson (75), Evan McPherson (56), Matt Prater (45), Ryan Succop (76), Brandon McManus (59), Nick Folk (77), Dustin Hopkins (57), and Rodrigo Blankenship (52*). (Starred kickers are credited with 6 additional points for every week they missed)

So far, the Top 12 kickers by preseason ADP average 62.8 points compared to 55.2 from the average of all of our great plays. Yeah, it still stings.

Week 10 Situations

**Here is a list of the teams with the best matchups based on Vegas projected totals and stadium, along with the expected kicker for each team. The top five players who are on waivers in over 50% of leagues based on NFL.com roster percentages are italicized and will be highlighted in next week's column. Also, note that these rankings specifically apply to situations; teams will occasionally change kickers mid-week, but any endorsements apply equally to whatever kicker winds up eventually getting the start.**

As noted last week, Butker has finally crept back above the 50% rostered mark, which means he's no longer eligible for recommendation. But if you already have him, please keep him!

Great Plays