Everyone has that cousin you don’t talk about. That friend who just sort of disappeared after high school. The people in our lives that, for one reason or another, we tend to forget about, ignore, or exclude from our mind space as we think about more important or relevant things.

The Kicker is the weirdo cousin of fantasy football. Everyone sort of accepts he exists, but nobody wants to pay attention to him or even give him the time of day. It’s time someone stood up for the kicker, and I can think of literally no better human being in the charted universe than me to be the person that does so.

A lot of the concern (read: incessant complaining on the Internet about the kicker’s existence in fantasy football) is about how random it seems to be. The general prevailing thought is there is little to no rhyme or reason as to when [Kicker X] will perform well, and it’s simply a crapshoot. Well, that is a hypothesis that I believe has become trendy, and has reached “overstated”.

JJ Zachariason has rightly pointed out that 38 different quarterbacks finished with top 12 (starting-caliber) performances last year during the fantasy season (weeks 1-16). In that same time span, only 36 kickers finished in the top 12 (or tied for 12th) in any given week. This is not to say the kicker position is not at all subject to volatility. But kickers represent a more consistent (though only slightly more consistent) option than the darlings of the fantasy world, the quarterback. Of course, this is not to say that kicker is more valuable either, the difference between the top scoring quarterback and the twelfth quarterback is often bigger than the difference between the top scoring kicker and the twelfth scoring kicker.

This is merely to say that there is such a thing as a good kicker versus a bad kicker – just as there is such a thing as a good quarterback and a bad one – and this is clearly what many fantasy players miss. We mistake the fact that the difference between a top kicker and a low-end kicker is small with the fact that kicker is irrelevant. It’s not. Fewer (though, again, admittedly it’s slight) kickers entered the start-able range last year than quarterbacks. Some of that will undoubtedly be due to guys getting injured, but at least some of it has to do with some kickers are not good at their job. Additionally, while quarterbacks are more likely to get injured, a team is much more likely to cut (and as a result, replace) its starting kicker than its starting quarterback – so from that perspective, we aren’t talking about totally disparate levels of risk.

Have a quick look at the table below. Each X represents when the relevant player scored in the top 12 amongst kickers, and the week in which he did it.

 

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Cundiff x
Kaeding­­­ x
Bryant x x x x x x x x x x x
Walsh x x x x x x x x
Akers x x x x x x x x
Tucker x x x x x x x x
Zuerlein x x x x x x
Dawson x x x x x x x x x x
Graham x x x x x x x x x
Folk x x x x
Hanson x x x x x x x
Gould x x x x x x
Barth x x x x x x x x x
Gostkowski x x x x x x x x x x x
Tynes x x x x x x x x x
Vinatieri x x x x x x x x
Crosby x x x x x
Suisham x x x x x x x
Hartley x x x x x x
Nugent x x x x x
Succop x x x x x x
Prater x x x x x x x x
Scobee x x x x x
Bironas x x x x x
Janikowski x x x x x
Feely x x x x x
Bailey x x x x x x x x x x
Novak x x x x
Henery x x x x x
Hauschka x x x
Forbath x x x x x x
Lindell x x x x x
Medlock x
Carpenter x x x x x
Brown x x x
Gano x

I specifically want to call out four guys from this chart.

 

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Janikowski x x x x x
Crosby x x x x x
Barth x x x x x x x x x
Bailey x x x x x x x x x x

It seems pretty clear to me that two of these guys performed way better than the other two. Janikowski was pretty abysmal last year, and only once had back-to-back weeks in the top 12. Crosby was pretty irrelevant for the entirety of the season, until week 13 and 14 when he strung together his only two-week top-12 performance.

Meanwhile, Connor Barth was one of the better kickers all throughout the year, starting it off with a top 12 performance in week 1, and remaining a pretty consistent option. And though Dan Bailey was irrelevant weeks 1-5, he didn’t really disappoint owners beyond that.

The reason I bring this up: Crosby and Janikowski were both owned, as of the end of the regular season, in more leagues than Connor Barth. Crosby and Bailey had similar ownership (Crosby in 67% of ESPN leagues and Bailey in 69% of ESPN leagues). But Janikowski remained owned in 90% of leagues while Barth remained own in a paltry 33.4% of leagues. The fact that Janikowski, who had a pretty irrelevant back-half of the regular season, remained owned in so many leagues says to me that reputation, and not performance, drives ownership at the kicker position. And it does so in a way that just isn’t replicated at really any other position.

The fact is, even with all of the fantasy football talk out there, the kicker still gets very little play, and the kicker position, as a result, gets ignored by many fantasy owners. I suppose the inverse could be true: there isn’t demand for kicker analysis, because we think of them as kind of lame and interchangeable in real-life football. Either way – the marketplace for kickers is woefully under-represented. A lot of the new wave of stats are taking advantage of market inefficiencies. And it’s clear to me the market acts at best inefficiently and at worst irrationally when it comes to kickers. If you pay attention to what’s going on at the kicker position and others in your league, like the average fantasy player, continue to ignore the position, you can put yourself at a little bit of an advantage.

Look, no kicker pick-up is going to win you a championship on its own. While kickers can put up big points, in comparison to each other we are really talking about a difference of one to five points. But, if the points are out there, why wouldn’t you go grab them? That is to say, if you spend your time poring over wide receiver to gain what may be a five to ten point advantage in a crowded marketplace, why wouldn’t you spend a couple of minutes each week trying to grab two, three, or four points in a market that’s pretty much a barren wasteland? The points count the same, whether it’s your wide receiver gaining an extra two points or your kicker doing so. It might accouncont for merely a 5% difference in your team’s points, but if you could gain 5% in points through a little bit of kicker analysis, spending 0% of your time thinking about it, you are operating inefficiently.

I think it’s time to break out the cellphone, hit up ancestry.com, and make that call to your long-lost weirdo cousin the kicker. There might be a little bit more there than you think.

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