Value of a Kicker

[TheNoodleMan]

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Is there any research on angling punts and coffin corner attempts? I figure a good coffin corner punter must add something to a team.

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Until Hester started burning people, no one had used the coffin corner punt in years. The shanks on coffin corner punts hurt way more than regular shanks.

[Aces McGee]

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Outsiders did an interesting study that more or less proved that field goal accuracy is complete bs and all variance. There is almost no correlation from year to year in field goal accuracy. But there is a lot of correlation from year to year in the length of kickoffs.


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Where can I find this? I'm lobbying my fantasy leagues to elminate kickers and this is exactly what I've been telling them. If I don't have to duplicate Outsiders' work, than I'd rather not go through the analysis myself.

-McGee

[Jack of Arcades]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/sp...mp;oref=slogin

[Benholio]

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Outsiders did an interesting study that more or less proved that field goal accuracy is complete bs and all variance. There is almost no correlation from year to year in field goal accuracy. But there is a lot of correlation from year to year in the length of kickoffs.


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Where can I find this? I'm lobbying my fantasy leagues to elminate kickers and this is exactly what I've been telling them. If I don't have to duplicate Outsiders' work, than I'd rather not go through the analysis myself.

-McGee

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Well, in fantasy there might still be a difference in value between kickers based on the teams they play for. If a team gets fewer possessions and fewer scoring opportunities, their kicker is going to score less, I'd imagine.

Having said that, I agree its pretty much a crap-shoot each week.

[JordanIB]

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Is there any research on angling punts and coffin corner attempts? I figure a good coffin corner punter must add something to a team.

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Until Hester started burning people, no one had used the coffin corner punt in years.

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Jeff Feagles says hi.

[Salva135]

One thing I dislike about kickers on fantasy teams is that it awards kickers on teams that are bad. The worse a team is offensively, the more likely that team will be fall short of reaching the end zone, and thus more likely to kick the field goal.

I don't really mind if kickers only got a reasonable maximum of 5-6 points a game like a defensive player would, but when kickers rattle off 5 FGs in a game and end up with like 20 points that decides a head-to-head matchup, it's just silly.

[PokerFink]

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However regarding FGs...I don't doubt the study that FO did. But doesn't it seem foolish to say theres no skill in something like kicking a FG and that its all luck? I mean, I dunno....it just seems totally obvious to me that there has to be skill in it.

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I mean, there's a skill to it in the sense that there are guys who are NFL-caliber kickers and guys who are not NFL-caliber.

And there's a skill to it in the sense that, over the course of their careers, one guy might be an 83% kicker and one guy might only be a 73% kicker. Over a 12 year, 400 kick career, we probably have a big enough sample to say that an 83% kicker is more accurate than a 73% kicker.

But there is a TON of variance in field goal accuracy. An enormous amount. And from year to year you're only looking at a very small sample size. Kickers get, what, about 25-40 FG attempts per year? And of those kicks, maybe 2 or 3 are "clutch"? That's a huge sample size problem.

Here's some kickers and their year-to-year accuracy (beginning of career through this year):

Vinatieri: 77, 86, 80, 79, 72, 80, 90, 74, 94, 80, 89, 94
Rackers: 57, 61, 83, 75, 76, 95 (40/42), 76, 67
Akers: 88, 84, 88, 83, 84, 73, 78, 80

Akers had five straight years in the 80's and then fell off, Rackers was consistantly bad and then nailed 40/42 out of nowhere, and Vinatieri is just all over the place. I mean, we can probably say that Vinatieri and Akers are both more accurate than Rackers, but still Rackers can go out and hit 40/42. So who knows.

So if you're in the market for a kicker, and there is a guy who hit 85% last year and a guy who hit 80% last year, logic tells you to chose the 85% guy. But it's more or less irrelevant.

Kickoff distance, otoh, has a large correlation from year to year.

[PokerFink]

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Is there any research on angling punts and coffin corner attempts?

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Not that I know of, but I would love to read up on it if anyone can dig something up.

[PokerFink]

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Outsiders did an interesting study that more or less proved that field goal accuracy is complete bs and all variance.

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Where can I find this?

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Pro Football Prospectus 2007, in the Arizona Cardinals section. It has some tables and additional info that's not in the NY Times article, which was already linked.

[SL__72]

They have made the point, multiple times I believe, that the correlation, year to year, for kickoff distance between kickers is MUCH higher then FG%... which among NFL kicker is almost 0.

So basically what JOA said in his first post, find one who can kick the [censored] out of the ball and lock him up.