September 27, 2024

To bring more joy into streaming, I hope Week 3 was a true low point for the season!

Every season will have a mix of down weeks among the great ones.

As posted here on Reddit, week 3 was the most abysmal week for kickers (not just for me but for all rankers). Digging up data that goes back more than 5 years, it’s clear to see that kickers have not scored less, and top-ranked kickers have not done worse, compared to this one week.

Week 3 saw a lot of other mix-ups too. Vegas lines themselves were already very poorly correlated with NFL results. And every fantasy position except D/ST was far less predictable than normal. Survivor path 3A will now be replaced by 3B. A week of many surprises.

Meanwhile and related to this, the betting lines took an astonishing hit, for a second week in a row— also a rare event, statistically and historically. I’d just posted here last week about the logic behind the betting lines approach: the reasons for always saving a reserve, and what expectations are reasonable. One additional perspective I could maybe add here is my opinion about how much is “thanks to the models” versus luck. Without being very rigorous, I think I can estimate there’s no credit to be taken for weekly returns falling outside the range of 90%-115%. If returns get much higher than that, it’s more luck than the models. And if it’s much lower than that— like last week— then that’s also pure chance. There’s simply no rhyme or reason, and we need to pick up and chug on.

Now let’s hopefully see kickers start kicking again in week 4!

/Subvertadown

In week 3, Kickers scored their lowest in at least 5 years. Kickers who were ranked top-10 (FantasyPros) averaged only 4.8 points. The only other <6pt week was in 2022 (5.6 points).

Something felt exceptionally weird about the week 3 kicker results. So I looked into it.

• The average of all 32 kickers this past week 3 was 6.15 fantasy points-- the lowest average I have on record.

• The kickers who were ranked in the top-10 (FantasyPros) averaged 4.8 this week.

I dug up my old files containing past weekly rankings, and I copy-pasted from each week. Compared to more than 5 years of ECR rankings (FantasyPros and/or borischen.co, which uses FantasyPros):

• The previous low point (average of top-10 kicker results) was in 2022, week 10.

• The average of that week's top 10 ranked kickers was 5.6 fantasy points,

• That was the only other time the top-10 kickers dipped below 6.0 points:

Essentially every ranker got Butker and Aubrey, for their 13 and 11 points.

After those two, the other kickers in the top 10 (ECR) were:

• Fairbairn: 0

• McPherson: 8

• Moody: 5

• Tucker: 3

• Grupe: 6

• Carlson: 1

• McLaughlin: 1

• Elliott: 0