RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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I’ve been made aware of a recent online controversy around kickers in fantasy football leagues, elitism, and luck. As the foremost defender of kickers’ place in our little game , I am morally, professionally, and even legally obliged to respond.
The argument against keeping the kicker spot in your fantasy league has always gone something like this: Kicker opportunity and production are impossible to project. There is no reliable way to identify a kicker who should have plenty of chances to boot the football and score points because the kicker is entirely reliant on the offense — and defense — to which he’s attached.
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This anti-kicker zealotry falls flat with the slightest probing. If you’ve ever plugged a running back into your weekly fantasy roster because the back was playing a poor rush defense and his team had a high implied Vegas total and tended to run the rock with a lead, you followed good process even if or when that running back puts up a handful of fantasy points because things did not go as you expected. Maybe his team fell behind early and had to abandon the run. Maybe his team ended up scoring a bunch of points but never had short touchdown opportunities, or perhaps your running back had a couple goal line chances he couldn’t punch in.
Maybe you used a quarterback in your lineup because he was playing in a matchup that profiled as a shootout. And maybe that QB threw for 300 yards and had his way with the opposing secondary. And maybe his team scored four touchdowns -- three on the ground and one through the air. That’s just a bad run-out. You were right to have played that quarterback, even if the quarterback on your bench scored five or ten more fantasy points.
None of this makes your process bad. These things happen. We make small bets here and there about who is most likely to benefit from positive scoring conditions. Make enough good-process bets and you’ll come out on top more often than not. Until Claude gets smarter, there’s no surefire way to know the future.
Bad results from good process have never, in my many years of podcasting and writing about this game, prompted calls for abolishing quarterback or running back or tight end from fantasy lineups. No one, for whatever reason, has ever mocked the mere idea of a quarterback or running back (or wideout) in a standard fantasy roster. I’ve never heard someone wail on a Sunday night that the QB position simply had to go because their guy ran cold on touchdowns that day. But a kicker misses two of his three field goal tries in a game and you won’t wait long for the fire and pitchforks of a crowd demanding the end of kickers in fantasy football.
There are real and viable ways to identify good season-long (and weekly) kicker options if you’re willing to open your mind to such a concept (this is where I tell you that I snuck some pro-kicker propaganda into our 2026 Fantasy Football Mock Draft ).
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The Kicker Process
A reliable kicker almost always plays for a team that produces lots and lots of neutral or positive game script. It makes sense on a basic level: An NFL team that plays from ahead or often finds themselves in close (one-score) games is much more likely to attempt field goals throughout the game. These teams typically won’t forgo field goal tries in the second half as they chase points and try to close a yawning deficit. They’ll take the three and move on.
NFL head coaches — save for a few spreadsheet warriors — absolutely love to take the three and move on.
This naturally raises the question: Which NFL teams are most likely to see plenty of positive and neutral game script in 2026? For a hint, let's look to this year's strength of schedule.
This, of course, is not the end-all-be-all of our kicker process. That the Cowboys are stuffed deep in the lower right quadrant doesn't mean Brandon Aubrey is off limits in fantasy. He's not. The Jets being in the upper left quadrant shouldn't have you running to draft whoever is going to kick for New York in 2026 (Jason Sanders or Cade York, it's hard to say).
Head coaches' fourth down decision making should also play a factor in how we value kickers in fantasy leagues. What we're trying to do — put as simply as possible — is maximize kicker opportunity, also known as field goal attempts. Long-distance acumen doesn't matter, as I once wrote in a study of kicker production somewhere on the internet. Not even accuracy matters as much as plain old kicker opportunity.
We need head coaches, in other words, who don't have much interest in maximizing points.
Above is a quick look at how teams have handled fourth down decision making over the past three seasons. Some may come as a surprise to you. Others, not so much.
This, like the strength of schedule data above, should not be used to determine which kickers you fade and which kickers you target in your fantasy drafts. There are real downsides, however, to hyper-aggressive decision makers who can take away a couple easy field goal tries in a given game. There's also upside for a kicker whose head coach is perfectly fine with lining up a field goal on fourth and one from the opponent's 25 yard line.
Below are my 2026 kicker tiers. I don't love the idea of ranking kickers because, as I've said for a dozen years, it's almost all about opportunity with the kicker position. Obviously an accurate kicker can and often will make the most of that opportunity-rich situation, but being a deadly accurate kicker isn't imperative. I know that probably makes your skin crawl. Let it crawl. So it goes.
▶ Tier One Kickers
Ka’imi Fairbairn (HOU)
Houston last year led the NFL with 2.9 field goal tries per game...
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