Kickers Aren’t People, But They Are DFS Assets
More than any position in daily fantasy sports, kickers are extremely situation-dependent. We’ve previously written about the opportunity-based nature of the running back position, and we can take a similar perspective when evaluating kickers in a given week. While you might reasonably fade a top wide receiver who is matched up against a shutdown corner, you’re very unlikely to consider a kicker’s matchup against opposing special teams players. Could you imagine reading something like the following on a fantasy advice website?
Carlos Dunlap has already blocked two field goals this year and the Bengals’ field goal unit has been extremely effective over the past five games. They have been generating a ton of pressure on opposing kickers. Due to the tough matchup, I’ll likely be fading Justin Tucker this week.
Instead, we just expect that — as long as they aren’t one of the 100 worst players in NFL history — NFL kickers will succeed when given the opportunity. As a result, kicker selection is all about finding that opportunity, in the form of field goal and extra point attempts.
When selecting a kicker, you are likely to consider two things: Vegas and weather. The Vegas line for a game will give you a decent indication on the anticipated game flow, which you can then use roughly to project a kicker’s opportunity in that game. And we’re now four months into baseball season, so you are all already experts on the effects different types of weather can have on balls in the air.
Luckily for us, our Trends tool is great when it comes to measuring fantasy performance in all types of situations. I’m going to do my best to outline the situations that have the most effect on kicker performance in this “cheat sheet” article.
Vegas
If we’re willing to accept that kicker fantasy production is based more on opportunity than skill, we might as well start by looking at Vegas filters. By breaking down the Vegas-implied score for each team into increments of five, we can see that a kicker’s Plus/Minus steadily increases with the projected team total:
• 0-19.99 points: -0.80 Plus/Minus
• 20-24.99: -0.02
• 25-29.99: +0.44
• 30-plus: +2.93 (24 count)
If you remember only one thing from this article, let it be this table. Here, we look at actual points versus expected points in each of the groups from the previous section. Notice that there is very little difference in the Expected Points column across the different groups. Remember, the amount of points we ‘expect’ a kicker to score depends on how much they cost on FanDuel.
A kicker expected to score 8.00 fantasy points should cost $4,650 while an expected total of 8.24 matches up to a $4,900 salary. The monetary difference between a kicker on a team projected to score fewer than 20 points and one whose team is projected to exceed 30 points has been only $250 on average. To this point, FanDuel has not heavily factored Vegas into kicker pricing, if they have at all.
Let’s look at favorites vs. underdogs. Simply being favored to win has been good enough for close to a full fantasy point over the past two seasons:
Also, Plus/Minus has correlated with the game’s spread: The more favored a kicker’s team is, the higher his Plus/Minus has been.
It’s always tempting (for me at least) to select the cheapest kicker available on FanDuel. However, even kickers priced at the absolute minimum have not been able to overcome an unfavorable spread. Here, we are looking at minimum-salaried kickers whose teams are underdogs by at least a touchdown:
Weather
It would make sense that kickers struggle in inclement weather conditions, but has that actually been the case? You definitely don’t want a kicker who may see rain:
Or strong wind:
Temperature is fairly flat to a degree:
But once we get down to 30 degrees, it’s probably best to avoid:
High humidity can be good for fly balls in baseball, but I did not find the same effect in football. Humidity rarely pairs with extreme heat during NFL season as it does during MLB season, which is one possible contributing factor.
Location
We are used to stadiums playing a major role in MLB DFS and it always takes some conditioning for me to think of stadiums as ‘just places’ in other sports. Still, maybe there is something here, so let’s take a look.
In general, it doesn’t matter if a kicker is playing at home or on the road:
However, some individual kickers did show some indications of home/away splits, albeit over small samples (and this sentence is possibly the nerdiest thing I’ve ever written):
My guess is that these splits probably have more to do with the kickers’ teams (and not the kickers themselves) performing better or worse on the road. Remember, opportunity is everything for kickers. If a team is dominant at home, it probably makes sense to give their kicker a boost when playing at home.
Brandon McManus has the home/away split. Is there a Coors Field-like bump for kickers who are playing in the thin air? Over the past two years, the answer has been no:
Obviously, kickers can add extra distance to their kicks when playing in Denver. That’s just science (citation needed). [Editor’s Note: Citation provided.] But, for Broncos kickers, merely playing a game in Denver has not led to increased salary-based fantasy production.
What about for visiting kickers in Denver?
Visiting kickers do much worse in Denver than they do elsewhere. Why? Maybe because some of their games are played in colder weather. Also, offenses tend not to do well against Denver’s defense and so opposing kickers will have fewer opportunities in general. They have generally been expected to lose while not scoring many points.
We often think of intra-division showdowns as low scoring games in which teams trade field goals and the games are decided late into the fourth quarter. That begs the question: do kickers perform better in divisional affairs? Nope, it actually has no effect at all:
Bonus
Of course, I would be remiss to wrap up this article without first mentioning a few of our own metrics here at FantasyLabs. Bargain Rating isn’t a thing for kickers since the position doesn’t exist on DraftKings (so there’s no relative pricing to compare), but we can leverage Salary Change to our advantage.
Because 1) kickers are priced down mainly because of poor recent performance and 2) future performance is primarily a function of opportunity, it makes sense both logically and in practice that Salary Change will be a helpful metric in selecting kickers.
We don’t have a ton of kicker-applicable Pro Trends and the ones kickers can qualify for will be mostly team-based bonuses described above (Team is Favored, Vegas Score is X, etc.). For that reason I wouldn’t give kickers an EXTRA boost based on the number of qualified Pro Trends they have. But browsing through the Pro Trends column can serve as a nice shortcut so that you don’t need to examine each kicker’s matchup as closely.
For what it’s worth, kickers with at least two Pro Trends tend to do well.
