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.
Why You Shouldn't Spend a Pick on a Kicker
If you've played fantasy football for a while, you're undoubtedly familiar with the common recommendation that you not bother drafting a kicker until your very last pick of the draft. However, you might not be sure why this is the best way to go.
In 2013, Chase Stuart looked at average draft position (ADP) data dating back to the year 2000. For each position, he calculated how many points over replacement owners got on average from the first player drafted at a position, from the second, from the third, and so on.
In 2005, the first quarterback off the board was Peyton Manning, who had a strong season and finished the year 3rd at his position. In 2008, the first quarterback off the board was Tom Brady, who got injured in his first game and produced essentially no value. Average together Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, and every other quarterback who came off the board first in any given year, and the average value of the top quarterback selected was 84.2 fantasy points over replacement.
Chase then repeated that process for every draft slot at every position. The top running back drafted gave about 126.5 points of value over replacement, the top wide receiver gave 107.5 points, the top tight end gave 58.5 points over replacement, the top defense gave 14.6 points over replacement, and the #1 kicker off the board gave... 8.1 points of value over the course of the whole season.
Not only were the top-drafted kickers not very valuable, but they also barely outperformed later-drafted kickers. The 12th kicker off the board provided 5.6 points over replacement, on average, meaning the difference between being the first team to draft a kicker and the last team to draft a kicker is just 2.5 points over a full season.
So, there's no compelling reason to be the first GM to draft a kicker. Or the second GM, or the third. For that matter, there's no real reason to be the eighth or the tenth. In fact, unless your league mandates it, there's really no reason to draft a kicker at all!
That study is more than a decade old at this point. Have things changed? I've been tracking kicker performance by preseason ADP since 2020, and the results suggest... maybe a little, but not much.
In the most basic scoring system (1 fantasy point for every point scored), the top four kickers off the board over that span average 7.73 points per game. The next four average 7.18 points per game, and the four after that average 7.01. In general, the difference between being the first team to draft a kicker and the last team is about three-quarters of a point per game.
That's not nothing, but opportunity cost matters. In fantasy leagues on NFL.com, the first four kickers are getting drafted in the 8th or 9th round. The next four go in the 10th-12th, while the four after that all fall to the 14th or 15th. The difference between an 8th-round pick and a 15th-round pick at receiver or running back is much greater than at kicker-- it's the difference between Aaron Jones or D'Andre Swift and Chuba Hubbard or Zach Charbonnet.
But what if I told you that wasn't the end of the story? What if I told you that you could get just as much production as the teams spending an 8th-round pick on their kickers without ever investing a single resource at the position? Remember, since 2020, the first four kickers off the board have averaged 7.73 points per game.
In Rent-a-Kicker, every week, we identify the best matchups among kickers that are unrostered in at least 50% of fantasy leagues. And over that same span, the average score of all of the highlighted castoffs with a great matchup is 7.70 points per game.
You shouldn't spend any resources on kickers because you don't need to; you can score the same amount of points using nothing but the kickers freely available on your league's waiver wire.
But you don't need to take my word for it. I'm a big believer in transparency and accountability, so I register and track all recommendations. I will provide links to six years worth of history, and we'll track the results of this year's picks as we go.
Methodology
There are a few positive indicators for which kickers are likely to have better weeks. Talent is certainly one of those indicators. The problem for our purposes is that talent is expensive. Justin Tucker might just be the best kicker in NFL history— a claim that I do not make lightly. As a result, he typically scores slightly more than you might expect from an average kicker in the same situations. But Justin Tucker is also the first kicker off the board by ADP, and we're determined not to pay a premium.
The other problem for our purposes is that talent is virtually impossible to estimate. Placekicking results are so noisy that, outside of Tucker, we just don't know who is genuinely good and who is just on a hot streak. The guys with an average substantially better than you'd expect all have such small sample sizes that it's likely a fluke. The guys with huge sample sizes all have averages that are about what you'd expect.
In the past, I've tried to name kickers other than Tucker who were probably a bit better average. Four years ago, I mentioned Stephen Gostkowski as a proven veteran who we could be relatively confident was good; Gostkowski finished the year with the third-worst field goal percentage in the league and never played another NFL game.
For less-proven guys, it's even more of a roller-coaster. Through thirteen games in 2019, rookie Matt Gay ranked 5th in the league in field goals over expectation (based on the distance of each kick). Over his final three games, Gay made just three of his eight attempts. Gay ranked 6th in ADP heading into 2020 but was cut before the season even started and spent the first 10 weeks out of the NFL.
Then he landed with the Rams and was the #6 fantasy kicker over the final seven weeks. He converted on a ridiculous 94% of his field goals in 2021 and 2022 and then signed the largest free agent contract at the position in NFL history. Again, this is a guy who may have never gotten another opportunity if not for a late injury in 2020.
As a result, my model doesn't even consider kicker talent in making its weekly recommendations. We can't afford Justin Tucker, and everyone else is pretty undifferentiated talent-wise. Most professional kickers in the NFL are Stephen Gostkowskis or Matt Gays. They're basically 80% kickers who sometimes get lucky or unlucky over short stretches.
What we will consider is the projected Las Vegas point spread and game location. Typically, we want kickers on offenses who are projected to score lots of points because lots of points means lots of kicks. We prefer kickers in domes or Denver and would rather avoid kickers in places like Buffalo, New York, or Green Bay, Wisconsin, especially late in the season. Finally, we want to avoid kickers who are big underdogs because teams that trail by a lot often eschew field goal attempts to go for it on 4th down.
Prior Results
As I mentioned, I'm a big believer in accountability, which is why I summarize all results at the end of every season. Here's the data from 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, and 2018. Over the last four years (since I've switched to my more detailed tracking measures), the average of my Top 5 weekly recommendations is 7.60 points per game and the average of all recommended kickers with a great matchup is 7.70.
Over smaller samples, the data is noisy. In 2023, our "great matchup" kickers averaged 7.84 points. In 2022, that was 6.79. In 2021, that was 8.58. In 2020, that was 7.59. The gap between our best and worst season was nearly 2 points per game, but the model hasn't changed.
I said after a strong finish in 2021 that the results were likely just good luck, and I said after a poor finish in 2022 that the results were likely just bad luck-- unless the fundamentals of scoring in the NFL change, over the long haul, I'd expect our results to hew fairly close to the long-run average of 7.7 points per game.
Most years, that would be good for a 7th or 8th-place fantasy finish. But that doesn't mean that if you follow the recommendations, you should expect to score the 7th or 8th most points in your league at the kicker position; about half of the kickers who beat our average are out-of-nowhere surprises, like last year's top kicker, Brandon Aubrey.
Aubrey was the 17th kicker off the board by preseason ADP and the manager who was most likely to finish the season with him was the manager who read Rent-a-Kicker-- we recommended adding and starting him in each of the first four weeks and identified him as a potential long-term hold after just two weeks of action.
While individual results can vary greatly, especially over small samples, on average, my expectation is that managers who stream kickers based on matchup should finish third or fourth at the position in any given year and first or second over the long run (as the managers who beat them one year tend to fall behind the next).
That's enough theory for now, though. On to the recommendations.
Week 1 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.**
Great Plays
**Lions (Jake Bates)
Good Plays
Bills (Tyler Bass)
**Dolphins (Jason Sanders)
Texans (Kaimi Fairbairn)
Bengals (Evan McPherson)
**Eagles (Jake Elliott)
Chiefs (Harrison Butker)
**Bears (Cairo Santos)
49ers (Jake Moody)
**Seahawks (Jason Myers)
Rams (Joshua Karty)
Colts (Matt Gay)
Saints (Blake Grupe)
Falcons (Younghoe Koo)
Neutral Plays
Buccaneers (Chase McLaughlin)
Packers (Brayden Narveson)
Jaguars (Cam Little)
Poor Plays
Ravens (Justin Tucker)
Chargers (Cameron Dicker)
Browns (Dustin Hopkins)
Vikings (Will Reichard)
Commanders (Cade York)
Titans (Nick Folk)
Steelers (Chris Boswell)
Panthers (Eddie Pineiro)
Avoid at All Costs
Giants (Graham Gano)
Jets (Greg Zuerlein)
Cowboys (Brandon Aubrey)
Raiders (Daniel Carlson)
Cardinals (Matt Prater)
Broncos (Wil Lutz)
Patriots (Joey Slye)
