When Should You Draft a Fantasy Football Kicker? Which Kicker Should You Draft? The Numbers Don’t Lie

When should you draft a kicker? When pigs fly.

Which kicker should you draft? None of them.

I know, I know, time to cue the Adam Sandler music. . . but I honestly do not have anything against kickers.  If I ever needed someone to stand in for me in a game of chicken with an angry rhinoceros, Adam Vinatieri would be right up there after Chuck Norris.  “Clutch” is not even an adequate word for that guy.  Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t always translate to the fantasy world.

Though I adopted a policy of not drafting a kicker years ago, I never had the evidence to back up my intuition until now. Now I have two solid reasons, inconsistency and parity.

First, kickers are wildly inconsistent from one year to the next. This can be shown by looking at the top kickers in 2009 and 2010 (based on standard Yahoo! scoring). In 2010, a pack of eight kickers set themselves a bit apart from the rest of the herd by averaging over 8 points per game. Those 8 kickers were:

I then took a look back at the top 8 kickers for 2009. Only one kicker, David Akers, appeared on both lists. That is extremely high turnover. Many of the top 8 in 2010 likely did poorly enough in 2009 that they went undrafted and were available as free agents. I know last year I was able to grab Janikowski as a free agent right as the season was starting.

Furthermore, once you get past the top few kickers, they are relatively interchangeable. The difference between the ninth best kicker and the fourteenth best kicker was a whopping 0.25 points per game. Even expanding out to the fifth best kicker and the fifteenth best kicker only nets a 1 point per game differential.

So what does all this mean? To me, it means don’t draft a kicker unless you absolutely have to take one under your league settings. One or two kickers might be worth drafting if you could take them at the right time. Unfortunately, either a computer autopick or an ambitious newbie in your league will probably take them higher than you would ever want to take a kicker. Furthermore, given the unpredictability of kickers, you are very likely to draft a hot kicker from last year then end up holding onto them out of blind loyalty or inattentiveness when a free agent would be a better choice.

Instead, use the extra roster spot to take another late round chance on some young hotshot running back or a player that you think might emerge out of a position battle. This extra spot is even more valuable if your league drafts early in the pre-season, but it still will often be valuable to have that extra roster spot right up to the season’s opening kickoff. In a league where I am confident I can usually make the playoffs, I have even been known to play without a kicker in week 1. Finding an unexpected gem can have far more value in the long run than 7 or 8 points in week 1.

When I do finally get around to picking a kicker, I try to find someone with some upside, such as a kicker that had an injury last season, a second or third year kicker, or a kicker on an offense that appears likely to improve. If my league settings forced me to take a kicker, I would wait until the last round and look for the same type of player. Two years ago, I picked up Mason Crosby who finished fifth among kickers. Last year, as mentioned, I grabbed Janikowski and watched him lead the league.

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