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FanDuel advice: Let’s talk about kickers
The position isn’t the most complicated, but you can’t just blow it off.
Tommy Gilligan-USA TODAY Sports
You know what? I wanna talk about kickers.
My typical method for picking a FanDuel fantasy football kicker, as I've mentioned before, is to scroll to the bottom of the kicker list and pick the best $4,500 option (the cheapest price for any kicker). If I have a few hundred dollars left at the end of my roster, maybe I go back and try to find a nicer play, but in general, I just end up with one of the Nick Novak/Greg Zuerlein kicker hoi polloi.
It is far from foolproof, and it can't be mindless. I told this story before, but in Week 7, I was picking lineups for some head-to-head leagues, and settled on one of those cheap kickers. "Oh," I thought, "New Orleans has a good offense. That's a good kicker to choose." And in theory, it should have been. Except the New Orleans kicker I chose was Zach Hocker, who, as it turned out, had been released early in the week, a move that had completely escaped my attention. I picked an unemployed kicker, and I lost some head-to-head games by less than a point.
That’s an extreme example, but it does illustrate that kicker isn’t a position you can necessarily just ignore, fill with whoever. No, maybe you don’t give it the thought you devote to quarterback, but you do need some attention.
I took it to Excel, plotting every kicker’s salary this week against his average fantasy score each week. The top of each particular column, then, is the one that interests me:
The obvious standout there is Shayne Graham, who sits well atop his particular price point. Of course, Graham has played only three games in place of Matt Bryant, so let's not take his production as gospel yet.
No, the real takeaway is that there's a leader at each price point. You can scroll down to the worst per-week performer (Andrew Franks, at $4,600) and sure, maybe he'll have a good enough game. Kickers are kickers are kickers, and things can happen. The odds, though, tend to favor those guys at the top of each list.
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