Kick the Kicker: Remix Part One

Jacob Feldman

It seems like a really long time ago, but my time with DLF started back in May of 2012. My very first article for the website and in fact my very first article to be published anywhere was a look at why kickers don’t belong in dynasty leagues. It was entitled Kick the Kicker. At the time, it was with quite a bit of resistance and skepticism. Over the last four years, I’m very happy to see that kicking the kicker has become a growing trend and possibly even the norm in dynasty leagues.  However, there are still quite a few of you who are playing in leagues which still use a kicker. For that reason I’m back again to give it another shot to see if I can help you right this wrong in your dynasty league and go kicker free from now on!

Let’s start with the reasons I hear about wanting to keep a kicker in dynasty leagues. Over the years, most of the people who rally behind the kickers and want to continue to include them in their dynasty leagues fall into one of a few groups. These people are often so entrenched in their views that they aren’t willing to step back and actually look at the validity of their own argument. None the less, I’m going to give it a try.

Four types of people who want to keep kickers in dynasty leagues

Traditionalist – These people want to keep kickers in their dynasty leagues because there have always been kickers. When they played in redraft leagues decades ago they had kickers and most dynasty leagues used to have kickers as well. There isn’t much you can really do with these people. Fantasy football today is way different from what it was a decade ago. Dynasty leagues are and should be different than redraft and daily leagues. Things need to evolve with the times, and it is okay to have different rules in different types of leagues (dynasty vs redraft vs daily), but some people just hate change.

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Purists – These are the people who want their fantasy football leagues to mirror the NFL as much as possible. Their main argument is that since kickers score points in the NFL, they need to score points in fantasy leagues as well. I can understand this argument to a certain point, but if you are someone who truly believes this, aren’t you saying that scoring points is the main factor in fantasy relevance? By extension, wouldn’t that mean points for yardage, receptions, and other items which aren’t points in the NFL shouldn’t be points in fantasy leagues? Or at the very least, shouldn’t the board, meaning the touchdowns be the deciding factor? Maybe they are okay only applying their logic in one direction, but if you’re okay breaking with the NFL scoring method some of the time, I think you need to be okay with it in all cases.

Gamblers – This group feels luck is and should be one of the driving forces in fantasy leagues. They like that a kicker can post 25 one week and 0 the next without much rhyme or reason to it. They feel those big swings are just an added element of excitement and luck in their leagues, and they like it. I really don’t understand this. Isn’t spending hours and hours doing research, reading articles on DLF, spending time in the forums, watching games, and everything else we do an attempt to minimize luck and make this more about skill? So why would you want to add in more luck which doesn’t need to be there? We already have injuries, referees, coach’s decisions, and so many other items which could be called ‘luck’. If you really want luck, here is an idea. You could make your lineup and draft decisions by rolling some dice and decide if you accept or decline a trade by flipping a coin. That way you can add an element of luck to your team without inflicting kickers on the rest of the league.

Opportunists – The final group of people are those who feel having kickers in the leagues gives them an advantage over the rest of the league. Occasionally I’ve had people who claimed they could actually predict kicker scoring and get ahead by doing this. Therefore, removing kickers actually hurt their team. However, everyone I’ve challenged on this has either failed the challenge or declined to participate. Most often, the people who talk about kickers giving them an advantage are getting that advantage by preying on less knowledgeable owners. The opportunists will trade away their kickers, because they know they are all roughly the same, and get something of value back in return from an inexperienced owner. Or else they will delight when someone drafts a kicker in the middle rounds. If this describes you, I would challenge you to find a few more competitive leagues. It is much more satisfying to win against people who know what they are doing.

People who are entrenched in one of these four camps are going to be very difficult to convince. In fact, some of you reading right now are probably in one of these four groups and are likely swearing at me as you read this article. That is okay. It most certainly isn’t the first time someone has disagreed with me. But if you are in one of those four groups, I encourage you to try stepping out of your box a little bit and examining the idea of kickers in a dynasty league from a big picture view. Do they really fit?

Before we can address the question of if kickers fit in dynasty leagues, we first need to figure out what it means to be a viable dynasty asset. In my eyes, if someone is a viable asset, it means they need to check three boxes.

First, they need to have something you can actually quantify. In other words, there needs to be a stat you can track. You can’t really have offensive linemen in your fantasy leagues because they don’t have an official NFL stat attached to them. I suppose you could try to use the yards a running back gets prior to contact, but that means it is dependent on the running back seeing the holes, getting to the right place, etc. Anyway, back to kickers. Kickers do have a stat we can actually track, namely the number of extra points, field goals, and the distances those occur from. So kickers seem to fit so far.

My second benchmark for dynasty relevance is there needs to be some kind of consistency and/or predictability from one week to the next. We’ve all seen the fourth string receiver who goes off for 180 yards and two touchdowns one week because of two long bombs. However, it was just a fluke and isn’t predictable nor consistent, and they end the season with 224 yards and those two touchdowns. They aren’t dynasty relevant. There are also players who will post 30 points one week and two the next. If you can predict this, that is one thing. Maybe they are a middle tier running back playing against the league’s worst rush defense one week and the league’s best the next. You know you are going to see a big swing and because it is predictable, it is okay. You can start them as your flex against the bad defense and bench them against the good one. However, if it is basically random and often contradicts what should happen, it doesn’t help you out when setting your lineup. This will be examined in part two.

My third benchmark goes back to the fact that we are talking about dynasty leagues. In order to be relevant, there needs to be some kind of consistency and predictability from one year to the next. Now there will always be free agency and things like that to mess things up a bit in the long term, injuries and suspensions mess up the consistency in the short term, but since these are dynasty leagues you need to be able to predict value from one year to the next. We know Odell Beckham Jr and Julio Jones will in all likelihood be two of the top receivers in 2016, assuming they stay healthy, as well as the next few years after that.  The same can be said of a lot of other players. This is what makes them worth holding on to. The more consistent and predictable their production, the more valuable they are to us. It is just minimizing risk. I’ll examine this in part three.

I’ll examine how well kickers meet the benchmarks for consistency and predictability within a single year as well as from one year to the next. If they fail either one or especially both of them, it just reaffirms my belief that they aren’t viable assets in a dynasty leagues. Make sure you come back to check it out!

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jacob feldman