2012 Fantasy Kicker Rankings

First off, give yourself a pat on the back for actually reading a piece about the 2012 Fantasy Kicker rankings. A lot can be said about kickers, and most of it is irrelevant to your Fantasy Football team. You see, the differences between the No. 1 scoring Fantasy kicker in 2011 and the 12th-best scoring kicker was 54 points – or what works out to be about 3.38 Fantasy points per game. Sure, that field goal-plus can be the difference between a win or a loss in your league, but is it enough to make a move on a kicker earlier than you should?

Here’s the Kicker

David Akers led all kickers in Fantasy scoring with 184 points last year. John Kasay was second-best with 151 points, and the 12th-best kicker, Nick Novak, had 130 points. So if you take away the top player at the position, the difference between second-best and 12th-best is just 21 points, or less than 1.5 points per game difference over 16 games.

Stephen Gostkowski, New England - 2012 Fantasy Kicker Rankings — Stephen Gostkowski has been one of the top kickers in Fantasy since joining the Patriots as a rookie in 2006. Photo Credit: Keith Allison

In 2010, there was no standout kicker, with Sebastian Janikowski leading the position with 150 points, and Robbie Gould coming in 12th with 116 points.

In 2009, Nate Kaeding was the top kicker with 152 points, and Kris Brown finished with 110, 11 spots later.

In 2008, Stephen Gostkowski led all kickers with 150 points, and Josh Brown was 12th with 124 points.

And finally, in 2007, Mason Crosby led the position with 147 points, and that “idiot kicker” Adam Vinatieri scored a 12th-best 118 points for the Colts.

So let’s call Akers’ 184 points in 2011 an outlier and look at the rest of the stats.

The difference between the top kicker in any given season and the 12th-best kicker between 2007-11, excluding Akers’ 2011 season, was about 30 points, which works out to about a 1.88-points difference each week.

In a 12-team non-PPR league last season, there were exactly two games that came down to two points or less.

To make a short story long, try to grab a good kicker, but don’t kill yourself in order to do it. If you have a late pick in the final round of your draft, just take what’s left to you. If you have an early pick in the final round, consider grabbing Gostkowski, Crosby or Akers late in the second-to-last round, to beat a couple teams to the punch. But that’s as far as you want to reach at this position.