Blame this piece on ‘Sheriff’ Bill Monighetti. A few days ago he published a piece on kickers. F*cking kickers. Because of that piece, I just wasted anywhere from five minutes to three-and-a-half hours looking at kicking data — I don’t know how long it was, because time dies when one looks at kicking data — but I’ve realized that now I need to write an article and I’ve used all of my research time playing around with this field goal finder, so . . . here’s an article about kickers.
This Is How I Get My Kicks
Even if kickers are people, I’m not sure that they’re human. And I know that I’m intellectually opposed to their inclusion in fantasy contests because their production is just so random.
I admit that it’s not entirely random. Over the last two years, kickers on FanDuel have averaged 8.10 points per game with a 0.00 Plus/Minus and 46.0 percent Consistency. Per our Trends tool, if they play in freezing temperatures, they do worse than average:
And they do above average when their teams are favored:
But, seriously, look at those numbers. Look at how relatively meaningless that information is.
This is not to say that we can’t find an edge with kickers. As Bill noted in his ode to the position, kickers on teams with implied totals of 30-plus points have historically yielded a +2.93 Plus/Minus. That’s pretty good. And there’s this incredibly insightful tidbit from Bill’s piece:
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.
That’s great information and a real edge — except maybe not. Or maybe so.
Week 1 Kickers: A Case Study
When FanDuel released Week 1 salaries on August 1st, I wrote position-by-position breakdowns for quarterbacks, running backs, wide receivers, and tight ends. I barely looked at kickers. I’m forcing myself to do that now.
Why Would I Pay Someone $5,000 to Kick Me in the Balls?
Stephen Gostkowski is a position-high $5,000, the Patriots are without starting quarterback Tom Brady, and they are implied to score the slate’s eighth-fewest points (21).
Pass.
A Six-Legged Beast With Three Heads
Currently implied to lead the slate with 27 points are the Cardinals, the Colts, and the Seahawks, all playing at home.
Cardinals kicker Chandler Catanzaro is $4,900. Colts kicker Adam Vinatieri is $4,800. Seahawks kicker Steven Hauschka is $4,800. It’s almost stupid to say this when the minimum salary for a kicker is $4,500 and the maximum salary is only $500 more — but for the position these guys are fairly expensive. Still, they’re not that expensive.
They will likely be fairly chalky in Week 1.
The Wooden Compass
If you’re old enough to remember chalk boards, you also might remember those huge wooden compasses that had chalk on one end and that math teachers would awkwardly use to draw large oft-imperfect circles to which they would point with a ruler and say, “That’s a circle” — as if we didn’t know what a f*cking circle was.
For the young’uns who have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s a photo:
Anyway, that’s what Chris Boswell is in Week 1. He’s going to be a chalky tool that lots of people use to pivot needlessly.
After the Cardinals, the Colts, and the Seahawks, the team with the highest-implied total is the Steelers with 26.5 points.
The Steelers kicker is $4,600 — “Only $100 above the minimum!” the unimaginative person will think — and as a result he could end up being in a lot of tournament lineups.
Really, how could he not be? A lot of DFS players probably choose their kickers by looking at some imprecise combination of historical offense, team implied total, past kicking production, and salary rank.
Last year the Steelers accumulated the third-most yards on offense. They were fourth in points forced per game. They have the slate’s fourth-highest implied total. Last year Boswell ranked second among kickers with 10.5 FanDuel points per game. And in Week 1 Boswell is ranked after 11 other players at his position.
As I said, he is the chalky tool that people will use to pivot. If people don’t want to pay up for the premium kickers . . . who cost no more than $300 more . . . Boswell is the guy they will roster.
Or this next guy.
The Next Guy
Falcons kicker Matt Bryant has two first names — one of which is elite — and he’s a minimum-priced player whose team is a three-point home favorite implied to score the slate’s eighth-most points (25.25) against a Tampa Bay team that last year allowed the third-most points per game in the league to opposing kickers.
He could produce a small circle of chalk in Week 1.
Why I’ve Bothered to Write Almost 800 Words So Far About Kickers
I believe that DFS players have a weird approach to kickers. They treat them as certain liabilities instead of potential assets. They select chalky kickers and basically hope that those kickers don’t cause them to lose.
I don’t have the data in front of me, but I venture to say that in any given week an inordinate percentage of kicker ownership is probably concentrated on only a handful of players. When people roster these players, they make kickers liabilities. With high-owned kickers, at best DFS players will keep pace with the crowd. At worst, their kickers will underperform expectations and prevent them from doing well in guaranteed prize pools.
But what if people treated kickers as if they were DFS assets?
How Would One Do That?
We can treat kickers as DFS assets in two key ways:
• Embrace the randomness at the position, fade the chalk, and practice arbitrage by rostering (potentially) non-awful kickers whom no one would want to roster.
• Seek upside at a position that people believe has no (or limited) upside.
Let’s go over these two items one at a time.
Differentiation
Basically, I’m talking about differentiation. If you punt placekick the position and roster a non-chalky player, not only do you have an underappreciated chance of having a kicker whose percentage odds of providing GPP value are higher than his ownership percentage, but you have also differentiated your lineup at a position that is hard to predict — which is the type of position at which you should differentiate your lineups, by the way — and now you have the enhanced ability to be chalky at some of the other, more important, skill positions, which provide more points and are easier to project.
Think about how low-owned Rams kicker Greg Zuerlein is likely to be in Week 1. Or Chicago Bears kicker Robbie Gould. Or one of 10 other kickers. So many kickers could be low-owned relative to their chances of not destroying your lineup. If you roster these guys so that you can have lineups that are differentiated in a strategic manner, you have turned the kicker position into an asset.
Upside
It’s late at night, I don’t want to do hardcore research on kickers because even I have standards, and I doubt that I would find a lot of actionable information anyway even if I were inclined to do hardcore research. Nevertheless, I think that there might be some ‘real’ kicking trends we can exploit.
What might qualify as ‘real-life upside’ for a kicker? Let’s say that five field goals attempts qualify. If a kicker based on his attempts alone has the chance to score 15 FanDuel points — and that’s not taking into account extra point attempts or possible bonuses for distance — then he has upside.
In 2015, at least five field goals were attempted by a single kicker in a game 17 times. Here are some trends I noticed:
• Turnover Rate: 58.8 percent of these kickers are on teams ranked in the top half of the league in percentage of drives ended not with a turnover. Theory: A team can’t attempt a field goal if it doesn’t have the ball. Also, if a team is conservative with the ball and fears turning the ball over, that team might be likelier to settle for field goals than risk losing the ball while aggressively trying to score touchdowns.
• Touchdown Rate: 64.7 percent of these kickers are on teams ranked in the bottom half of the league in percentage of drives ended with a touchdown. Theory: If a team can’t score touchdowns, it will probably attempt more field goals in at least a few games.
• Rushing Rate: 70.6 percent of these kickers are on teams ranked in the top half of the league in percentage of offensive plays that are rushes. Theory: If a team is running the ball, it will have fewer explosive plays per game and will be less likely to score long touchdowns in bunches. Also, if a team is conservative enough to run the ball a lot it’s also probably conservative enough to settle for field goals instead of being more aggressive and running offensive plays on fourth downs in the red zone.
• Touchdown Rushing/Receiving Ratio: 76.5 percent of these kickers are on teams in the top half of the league in the rushing-to-receiving ratio of their offensive touchdowns. Theory: This is a big one, as 52.9 percent of these kicking games are had by the five teams that rank highest in this ratio: The Rams, Vikings, Chiefs, Bills, and Broncos. If a team is hellbent on scoring by not throwing the ball but running it instead, then the team is likely to score fewer touchdowns and thus will need to settle for more field goals.
• Field Goal Rate: 76.5 percent of these kickers are on teams in the top half of the league in percentage of drives ended with a field goal attempt. Theory: This point is big and screamingly intuitive. If a team attempts field goals on a relatively high percentage of its drives, then it will be likelier to attempt more field goals if it gets more drives than usual in a game.
In total, these games produced an average of 14.6 NFL points via the kicking game. They doubtlessly produced more FanDuel points via the distance bonuses.
Right Around 1,600 Words: The Size of My Vocabulary
I’m joking. My vocabulary isn’t that big. To quote someone who knows words: “I have the best words.”
To that end . . . I don’t really have any momentous final words for this piece. If you’ve read this far you’re either brilliant or bored. In either case, you probably don’t need me to sum up for you the idea that you should roster cheap and non-chalky kickers in GPPs in order to differentiate your lineups — especially those upside kickers on teams that run the ball a lot, have low touchdown and turnover rates, score a high percentage of their touchdowns via the ground game, and end a high percentage of their drives with field goal attempts.
But I guess I just summed up that idea anyway.
Greg the Leg, I’m looking at you. Blair Walsh, you might do.
P.S. Roberto Aguayo.
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The Labyrinthian: 2016, 82
This is the 82nd installment of The Labyrinthian, a series dedicated to exploring random fields of knowledge in order to give you unordinary theoretical, philosophical, strategic, and/or often rambling guidance on daily fantasy sports. Consult the introductory piece to the series for further explanation.
Previous installments of The Labyrinthian can be accessed via my author page. If you have suggestions on material I should know about or even write about in a future Labyrinthian, please contact me via email, [email protected], or Twitter @MattFtheOracle.
Matthew Freedman is the Editor-in-Chief of FantasyLabs.
