For some reason, this is still a debate amongst the average fantasy football player. Even in serious groups that feature a league full of smart football guys that do hours of research and draft prep, this is still a common practice. Despite every fantasy football expert including the venerable Matthew Berry always advocating drafting kickers last, kickers are still being taken in earlier rounds. According to draft data from Yahoo Sports this year, in a standard 15 round draft, 15 kickers were taken before rounds 14 and 15, some as early as the middle of the eighth. That’s before you’ve drafted any bench players or even one of your everyday starters. This is absurd, and I’ll try once again to prove it as such for two main reasons. Discerning managers can almost always find a top-12 kicker in the waivers, because the top-12 kickers are never all drafted, and the average difference in kicker performance is negligible. Arguments will be made assuming a standard 12 team league.
Using data from the last three years on Fantasy Pros let’s look at the 12 kickers taken and where they finished up. In 2019, seven of the top-12 kickers were not drafted (assuming only 12 kickers are drafted, which is how it should be). The ones that were finished 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 7th, 11th. That includes three kickers that were drafted before round 15 and ended up outside the top-12 scoring kickers. In 2018, four top-12 kickers went undrafted, and in 2017 it was six. In 2018, the No. 1 kicker Ka’imi Fairbairn went undrafted, and the first two kickers off the board finished 10th and 12th, not worth the non-15th round draft position they were getting. 2017 saw much the same story. The top scoring kicker, Greg Zuerlein, was not drafted, and two of the top 5 kickers drafted (all before round 15) finished 27th and 28th. It is incredibly difficult to determine kicking ability and consistency in a fantasy setting, because so much of fantasy kicking is opportunity based, which is almost impossible to determine year to year. Joey Slye was 26th in field goal percentage but ended up kicker No. 10 simply because he was 8th in field goals attempted. But I digress, fantasy kicker consistency could get a whole other article on it. The point is, nearly half of the top scoring fantasy kickers in the league are on waivers at some point, and all three years we looked at two of the top five kickers were available.
I’ve shown that you can get a top-12 kicker in each fantasy season quite easily just by working the waivers. You can even get top five kickers fairly reliably. But does that even matter? Let’s take a look at the No. 1 scoring kicker versus the No. 12 scoring kicker each year, kicker No. 12 being the theoretical last kicker you would start. In 2019, Harrison Butker led the league with 166 points scored, while Chris Boswell was 12th with 126, which ends up being a 40-point difference. Which may sound like a lot, until you realize that it’s just 2.5 points per game in a 16-week season. Put another way, if a fantasy team scores 90 points per week (probably on the low end), that would average out to be 1440 total points in a season. That 40 points difference is a scant 2.7% of your total fantasy score. Compare this to the QB position, another position where you have exactly 12 starting players. In 2019, No.1 was Lamar Jackson at 421 points, and No.12 was, fittingly, Tom Brady at 271. That 150-point difference is 9.3 points per week, or 10% of an average 1440 score. (Note that Lamar Jackson played a game less than Brady as well.) The difference in running back and wide receiver is similarly wide. For running back, it was McCaffrey’s 355 versus No. 24 (the last RB you would start, not even including flex) Sony Michel at 140. For wide receiver it’s Michael Thomas’ 225 versus Terry McLaurin’s 134. For defense, it’s the Patriots at 236 versus the Bill’s at 130, and lastly for the tight end it’s Travis Kelce’s 157 versus Jason Witten’s 76.9. The lowest difference of these positions is the tight end’s 80-point difference, still double that of the kickers. From 2013-2019, the average difference in points between kicker No. 1 and kicker No. 12 is 40, so this is a trend that persists season after season.
It’s simply not worth drafting kickers before the last possible round in any circumstance. Fantasy kicker performance is nearly impossible to determine, so why bother spending precious draft picks that could be spent on valuable handcuffs and sleepers on a kicker? Top-12 kickers will always be available on waivers, and even getting a top kicker is almost meaningless. It really begs the question, does fantasy football even need kickers? My hot take is they are wholly unnecessary and should be removed. We already don’t play punters for similar reasons, might as well get rid of kickers altogether. Heck let’s just remove special teams as a whole. But that’s an article for another time.