Kick the Kicker: Remix Part Three
After a few years away from the topic, I’ve decided to come back to my idea of kicking the kicker. If you missed part one of this reiteration, make sure you go back and check it out. I talked about the types of people who want to keep kickers in dynasty leagues and some potential flaws in their logic. I also went through the three requirements I feel must be met for a player/position to be a viable dynasty asset. In case you missed those, here they are in very brief summary.
- Must have a measurable statistic
- Must be consistent and/or predictable from one week to the next
- Must be consistent from one season to the next (this is dynasty after all!)
Kickers meet the first criteria but as I examined in part two of this series, they failed the second one in pretty spectacular fashion. They were easily the most inconsistent and the least predictable of the positions. For full details, make sure you take a look back at part two. Now it is time to turn our attention towards the year to year consistency to see if they hold their value from year to year, even if week to week scoring is all over the place. Remember that I’m using standard PPR scoring for other positions. For kickers, I’m using 3 points for a field goal under 40 yards, 4 for a kick from 40-49 yards, 5 for something 50 yards or longer, 1 point for an extra point, and -1 for a missed extra point or field goals within 40 yards.
Year to Year Consistency
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For this part, I’m going to look at a five year window. This means I’m going back to the 2011 season and moving forward to 2015. I’m going to focus in on the top ten finishers and see how many repetitions we see at the various positions. I’ll track the number of repeats from one year to the next as well as the overall occurrences in the five year span. I’ll also look for explanations on why people didn’t repeat. For example, did three of the top ten from the year before end up with a major injury or were they just a lot less effective than the year before? My general expectation is that the positions with fewer players (Quarterbacks, Tight Ends, and Kickers) will have more repeats in the top ten. After all, if there are only 35 players who start at your position in a year, top ten is much easier than if there are 60 or 70 players at your position. I also expect the running backs to be one of the lowest due to injuries.
I started just by looking one year to the next. So I looked at the top ten at each position and checked to see how many of them were in the top ten the following year. If the top ten was exactly the same for all five years, there would be 40 reoccurrences. That’s ten each from 2011 to 2012, 2012 to 2013, 2013 to 2014 and 2014 to 2015. That’s obviously not going to happen. Players retire, get injured, get suspended, have an off year, change teams, change coaches, new rookies push them out and many other reasons. Nonetheless, it is interesting to see how consistent the top ten is over a five year span.
At first glance, it is about what I expected. The positions with fewer players showed more consistency among the top ten. This makes perfect sense. I was still a little surprised at the low numbers across the board through, especially at the receiver position since everyone views them as the reliable position. I looked a little bit closer, and I noticed the same names were showing up a lot, but not always in back to back years. Maybe someone was top ten in 2012 and 2014, but not 2013. I started to look at the reasons why someone didn’t repeat from one year to the next. I’m sure the top reason is going to shock a lot of you, because it will completely change the way the world views football. (That is sarcasm right there in case you missed it!) Football players get hurt.. a lot. Even missing two or three games is likely going to push a player out of the top ten for that season, so injuries definitely come into play a lot, more so at some positions than others.
In order to help make up for this, I decided to look at the entire five year span and check how many players showed up in the top ten more than once at any point in time during the five year span. I’ll use Matt Forte as an example. Forte was a top ten running back in 2011, 2013, 2014, and 2015. He just barely missed in 2012. Using my first counting method, Forte only had two back to back occurrences (2013 to 2014 and 2014 to 2015). With the modification, he now has four appearances. Let’s see what the modification did to the numbers.
With the modification, which minimizes the impact of temporary issues such as an injury, we start to see a little bit more separation. Another way to look at these numbers is to look at the difference between this number and 50. Looking at the quarterbacks, 50 minus 43 gives you seven. That means over the five year span from 2011 to 2015, there were seven quarterbacks who appeared in the top ten exactly once. For example, Robert Griffin III was a top ten quarterback in 2012 but no other year in the sample. That’s pretty amazing consistency from the position as a whole. If you’re trying to name the top ten quarterbacks this season, you know you’re going to be picking almost exclusively from the list of quarterbacks who have already done it!
What is up with the other spots, in the case of the quarterbacks, the other seven who weren’t repeats? Sometimes these are fluke appearances, like Griffin. Other times it is the end of a career guy having his last hurrah like Reggie Wayne in 2012 or a young player just starting his run like Allen Robinson in 2015. In those cases, if the sample was expanded another year in both directions, we would see a repeat. But you need to cut the sample off somewhere, so it is going to happen.
Let’s get back to the overall numbers and the point at hand. Kickers had 30 reoccurrences with the modification. In other words, in the last five years, there were 20 different kickers who produced top ten numbers exactly once in that span. Meaning 40 percent of the top ten kickers in the last five years have been people who were never top ten kickers before and haven’t been since. If you were picking the top ten kickers for 2016, you would need to pick four-five kickers who haven’t ever been top ten guys before in their careers to be top ten this year. Talk about bad odds at nailing that top ten!
Yes, there are a few consistent kickers. Stephen Gostkowski jumps to mind. He’s been top five at the position for each of the last five years. However, he is the exception not the rule. Dan Bailey is another one with four top ten appearances (though only one in the top five). The fact that the two of them account for roughly a third of the year to year consistency for the entire position says something!
Year to Year Consistency Conclusion
With injuries, trades, free agency, coaching changes, age, and everything else which happens from one year to the next in the NFL we all know there are going to be some inconsistencies. People lose their jobs to more talented players or get hurt on a regular basis. It is why planning your team more than about three years out proves to be pretty difficult. However, this inconsistency isn’t the same at all positions. Once again, the kickers bring up the rear when it comes to tracking their production from one year to the next.
Figuring out who the top kickers will be from year to year, meaning how you would value them in trades, while drafting, or just on your roster is largely an exercise in futility. Outside of the two I just mentioned, you’re going to be pretty hard pressed to nail it down. In fact, almost half of the top ten at the kicker position is going to be people we’ve never seen at the top of their position before and probably won’t ever see there again. Hence the reason why the general redraft strategy of drafting your kicker in the last round developed. You really do have just about as good of a chance with some random kicker you’ve never heard as you would picking just about anyone else.
Overall Conclusion
Originally I set up three conditions for a player or a position to be fantasy relevant. They needed a quantifiable statistic, consistency/predictability from week to week (so you know when you can and can’t start them in your lineup), and consistency from year to year (so you know how to value them). Kickers definitely have the first one, but they were last by a pretty wide margin for week to week as well as being last for the year to year measurements. I know some of you are going to disagree, and you probably fit into one of the four categories I mentioned back in part one, but I think it would be pretty difficult to argue kickers are a viable dynasty asset based on the numbers.
If you’re still in a dynasty league with kickers, I think it is definitely time to Kick the Kicker!
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- Final 2021 Pre-Draft Rookie Mock: Round Three - April 28, 2021
- Final 2021 Pre-Draft Rookie Mock: Round Two - April 26, 2021
- Final 2021 Pre-Draft Rookie Mock: Round One - April 25, 2021
