What Makes a Good Fantasy Football Kicker

Here's the short version: a good fantasy kicker is mostly a good offense. The team matters more than the leg, and the leg matters more than the aim.

That runs against how most people draft the position. Managers tend to chase last year's most accurate kicker, but accuracy barely varies between kickers and doesn't carry over from one season to the next. What does carry over — a little — is the ability to hit from 50 yards and beyond. And what predicts points best of all isn't anything about the kicker himself. It's how many times his offense puts him on the field.

Volume decides almost everything

A kicker scores points two ways: field goals and extra points. Both come from opportunity, and opportunity comes from the offense in front of him.

Across ten regular seasons (2016–2025, kickers with at least 15 field-goal attempts), how often a kicker attempts a field goal is the single strongest predictor of his fantasy points — stronger than his accuracy, stronger than his leg strength, stronger than anything else measured. Extra-point attempts tell the same story from a different angle: they track closely with how many touchdowns a team scores. A kicker on a top-10 scoring offense starts every season with a built-in points floor, just from PATs alone.

Field-goal attempts work a little differently. They don't rise and fall with team quality the way PATs do — great offenses often score touchdowns instead of settling for field goals, and bad offenses often stall out before reaching field-goal range at all. Extra points are the cleaner offense signal. Total kicks — field goals plus extra points combined — is the number to watch.

The takeaway: draft the offense, not the leg.

Accuracy is mostly noise

Here's the part that surprises people: a kicker's field-goal percentage from one year barely predicts his percentage the next year. Statistically, last year's accuracy and this year's accuracy are unrelated. A kicker who made 93% of his kicks last season is not more likely to be accurate again this year than a kicker who made 85%.

Part of the reason is that kickers, as a group, don't vary that much. The average field-goal rate across the league sits in the mid-80s, and most kickers cluster close to that average. The gap between a "good" kicker and an "average" one is smaller than fantasy managers assume, and most of what looks like a hot or cold streak is just randomness evening out over a season.

So when you're picking a kicker, don't pay for last year's accuracy. It's the least repeatable stat at the position.

The one thing that does carry over: the long leg

If accuracy doesn't repeat, is anything about a kicker himself worth paying for? A little — his leg strength on long field goals.

Kickers who make a lot of 50-plus-yard field goals tend to keep making them. It's a real, repeatable skill, even though it's a modest one. Long field goals are also worth more in most scoring formats, so a kicker who's a threat from 55 or 60 yards has a real edge over one who isn't, kick for kick.

This is why kickers on outdoor teams with a track record from long range, and dome kickers who don't have to fight wind, tend to hold value year after year. It's not that they're more accurate. It's that a 55-yard make is worth more than a 35-yard make, and they're the ones getting the chance to attempt it.

Predicting next year's fantasy points is genuinely hard

Put it all together and kicker becomes the hardest position in fantasy to project. None of the usual inputs — last year's fantasy points, last year's accuracy, last year's attempts — do a good job predicting next year's output on their own. Even the best of them, a kicker's history of long field goals, only explains a small slice of what happens the following season.

That's not a flaw in the data. It reflects something true about the position: a kicker's fantasy output depends more on his offense's game plan and how close games are than on anything he does with his leg. Offenses change year to year — new coordinators, new personnel, new opponents — and that resets a kicker's outlook more than his own track record does.

NextDyne Engine Projections treat kicker the same way this sample does: volume and distance mix first, not last year's make percentage. The position still has a wide error band. That's honest, not a missing feature.

Week to week, it's a streaming position

Even within a season, kicker output swings hard from week to week. Big scoring weeks are rare — a kicker posts a true boom performance only a handful of times a season — while quiet, low-scoring weeks happen roughly one week in three.

That swing comes down to that week's game script: a close game with stalled drives means field-goal tries, a blowout usually means fewer of them. That's a matchup question, not a player question, which is exactly why most fantasy managers stream the position — picking up whichever kicker has the best matchup that week — rather than rostering the same one all season. The Start/Sit board is built for that weekly call.

Don't forget availability

Kickers miss more time than people expect. A meaningful share of qualifying kickers each season don't play a full slate, and a noticeable chunk miss a month or more. Between injuries, slumps, and coaching changes, kickers get replaced mid-season more often than most fantasy managers plan for. It's one more reason not to spend a high pick — or a valuable dynasty roster spot — locking one in early.

What this means for dynasty rosters

In a dynasty league, all of this points the same direction: kicker is close to the last thing worth investing in. The position resets nearly every year, accuracy doesn't carry from season to season, and even the one repeatable skill — the long leg — only explains a small piece of next year's output. Holding a kicker on your bench in the offseason ties up a roster spot for something you can find on the wire the moment the season starts.

The exception is a kicker who's both on a strong offense and has a real track record from 50-plus. Those are rare, and they're the closest thing dynasty has to a startable kicker year over year. Right now that list is basically Brandon Aubrey, Ka'imi Fairbairn, and Chris Boswell— not because they never miss, but because the volume and the long makes keep showing up.

Notable kicker seasons, 2022–2025

Distance scoring: FG 0–39 = 3, 40–49 = 4, 50+ = 5, PAT = 1, missed FG = −1. Regular-season only. These are board scores, not NextDyne Engine league scoring.

Notice that Aubrey shows up three times despite his accuracy swinging from 94.7% down to 85.1% and back — his fantasy output barely moved, because his volume and long-range makes stayed high. That's the pattern this whole guide is built on: accuracy comes and goes, but a strong offense and a long leg keep showing up.

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