One of the things we don’t talk about enough in fantasy is how to optimally play DST and Kicker, in part because it’s now known that these positions are so high variance, and most engaged managers make plans to stream them (if they are in a league that hasn’t gotten rid of them altogether, which of course many have).
But as those realities have become known, there are interesting angles that open up. I want to focus mainly on DST here, because Kicker in my experience is a bit more straightforward, but I’ll hit on my approach there for a quick second.
Back in the day, I used to do a lookahead at implied points — and when I use that term I mean that for every game, the spread and over/under can be combined to create an implied total for each team, e.g. a 4-point spread with a 50-point over/under implies a 27-23 score, with the favorite implied to score 27 and the underdog 23 — and I would divide those numbers into implied passing, rushing, kicking, and DST points. To do that, I’d use season rates for each of those elements, and to cut to the chase, kicking was the most effective. And to cut further to the chase, what that meant was you wanted kickers whose teams would be projected to score a lot by these lines, and then also who tended to score a reasonably high percentage of their points in the kicking game (and on the weekly matchup level, were up against a defense that gave up a high percentage of points in the kicking game).
So the easiest things to consider on draft day to accomplish those feats are: 1) Does your kicker target play on a good offense? 2) Does his coach have an aggressive fourth-down style, or is he more likely to settle for points? That question No. 2 is becoming increasingly relevant to fantasy kickers in an NFL trending toward more fourth-down conversion attempts. But ultimately, an offense that is going to score will at least provide extra point opportunities, and then hopefully also some field goals as well. I don’t really subscribe to the idea that the very best offenses are too good for fantasy kickers because they score TDs too often — extra point accumulation is still a good thing, and for some of these offenses, they might not be particularly aggressive on fourth down when they actually are stopped (believe it or not, the Chiefs, Bengals, and Bills were all in the bottom five in fourth-down attempts last year, so their kickers still all finished very middle of the pack in FG attempts per game, while being top seven in extra points per game, and all their kickers were top-half options).
Justin Tucker is the one glaring exception to some of this, where he was one of the top-scoring kickers last year despite Baltimore finishing 19th in points. He led the NFL in field goal attempts because he’s a legit weapon the Ravens are going to lean into for long attempts sometimes, or otherwise might be more willing to “settle” for a FG when they know he’s borderline automatic from inside 50 yards.
But the other five kickers in the top six with Tucker last year were all from offenses that were top 12 in overall points scored. And then last year’s teams that racked up the most fourth-down attempts included the Browns, Cardinals (new coaching staff), Lions, Eagles, and Packers (new QB), and none of those teams had a particularly high-scoring kicker, although a couple of them had kicker injuries or used multiple guys.
Anyway, find a kicker in a good offense, and then there’s some stuff from what I want to write below about DSTs that might apply at kicker as well.
Some DST thoughts
One of the reasons it’s difficult to have these conversations is there’s a wide variety of league types out there. I had my draft in my longest-running home league — year 24! — last night, and DSTs started coming off the board with the 49ers at 10.04, and then once the seal was broken, you had the Bills at 10.08, two more in Round 12, and two more in Round 13, a round where very interesting players remained (I took Sam LaPorta that round).
In a draft like that, the answer is very simple — wait until the end of the draft, find a good Week 1 opponent, and stream your DST. I’m not sure exactly where it’s been shown, but I know research has been done that shows opponent matchup to be more important for fantasy DST scoring than the DST unit itself. In other words, bad DSTs facing turnover-prone offenses — say, young QBs, like C.J. Stroud, and I wound up with Baltimore’s DST in this draft last night, who get Stroud in Week 1 — are the best way to play it. And then when your good DST runs into a tough matchup, you just cut them and grab a different one with a good matchup. (Although, to be fair, the other thing we know is DST scoring is fairly high-variance, so one thing I’ll sometimes do is just play my DST against a tough matchup if they have a really nice matchup — or more likely a stretch of two or three — on the other side of that tough matchup, such that if I just play them through the tough matchup I’m set on the other side and don’t have to worry about re-adding them the next week.)
But a lot of you are playing in leagues where it’s not so simple. Here in 2023, most fantasy players who consider themselves pretty engaged are aware that you don’t want to take a DST or Kicker in Round 10. And so you get into leagues where no one takes either until very late. And there are some interesting game theory elements that come into play there.
First of all, if you’re in a league like that, it’s helpful to recognize in real time that most of your leaguemates are planning to do the same matchups-based streaming strategy that you are. They are telling you that by waiting forever to take a DST, so that means that your waiver wire is going to be competitive every week, all season long, as all 12 of you try to fill DST with the best matchup that week.
There are two ways you can come out ahead in that scenario, but both have costs. One is if you’re in a FAAB league and you bid a lot for these DSTs, perhaps allocating a quarter of your budget or more over the course of the season on sometimes hitting 5% or more for these key streamers. The other option is the ol’ lookahead, where you stash the DST a week early, but that one requires you to burn a roster spot that could otherwise be an interesting player that might have something break their way that week. Those bench spots are highly valuable, and that’s a real cost.
The whole idea for this post started when I got a call from my brother this morning, where he was in a slow draft in Round 13 on a site where he’s seen the 49ers go in Round 10 (and definitely by Round 13) in nearly all his leagues, and he prefaced by saying, “This may sound crazy…” but he wondered whether I thought there was some logic to going with the 49ers’ DST at that point. And after we talked through it, we came to the conclusion he should take them. The other option on the table for him was a backup QB, and he was fine kicking that can down the road for a higher-upside backup anyway (as an aside, we had a discussion about Jared Goff, his top option there, and Kenny Pickett and Sam Howell, who I have ranked a tier below, and it’s worth noting what I said to him about my rankings of those players which is that Pickett and Howell are the bigger swings for a QB2 slot in a one-QB league, and Goff is ranked ahead because he’s the safer QB1 option and also the better play in SuperFlex and two-QB formats, but again purely for how to play a single-QB league where I can cut and replace the player, I’d probably prefer the upside choices of Pickett and Howell straight up).
So my brother had correctly identified he was going to have a tough time battling it out on waivers for the top streamers every week — something I’ve heard from many of you who play in engaged leagues before — because everyone seemed to be in on this same logic of waiting at DST. And in this case, the 49ers have the potential to have a legit difference-making unit that you’d play in almost any matchup — sure, in a perfect world, streaming against the weakest offense every week might score more than the 49ers, but you’re not living in that perfect world because your leaguemates aren’t going to allow that strategy to be executed effectively, and so at that point there does become an argument that the clearest path to DST upside is just take the potentially elite option and play them in every matchup. It helps that for the 49ers, they open with the Steelers, Rams, Giants, and Cardinals. I think the first three aren’t exactly easy matchups, but there are turnover-prone QBs throughout that stretch. (Speaking of nice starts, New Orleans has a great one across the first six weeks as a later-round option, and hat-tip to Fantasy Life’s Ian Hartitz for where I got that idea.)
So anyway, this idea I sometimes get asked about where you guys are in more engaged leagues where everyone pushes DST and Kicker to the end — this is the part I’d say I could apply to Kicker, too, where if you only have to push up maybe a round or two from where you were going to take that DST or Kicker anyway, then I don’t mind that at all. What it means is you have a little worse options for your final bench slot or two, but the reality there is you do probably want to churn in the first couple weeks anyway, so I’m never really shy to make decisions that mean I might just have to cut someone early.
So if I was in a 16-round draft, and that meant getting my DST and Kicker at the Round 13/14 turn and then using the final two rounds to take the biggest cuts I could find, that works pretty great. If it’s an 18-round draft and you’d have to make the move in Round 13, I’m probably not doing both the DST and Kicker, and I’d likely prioritize DST — and specifically probably San Francisco — because Kicker does seem like more of a crapshoot and one where the battle for weekly options isn’t nearly as intense on the waiver wire (because the viable options aren’t nearly so scarce, as driven by the matchup-dependent element of DSTs that isn’t necessarily there for Kickers).