If you look at kicker ppg this year it's through the roof and not in line previous years. You have the ~K20 (7.5ppg) behaving like the ~K12 of previous years. You have the ~K12 (9ppg) behaving like ~K1 of previous years.
My hypothesis is that offenses are potent enough to drive down the field but suck ### in the red zone.
This is the first time I think I'm going to be holding some of my kickers through their byes.
When I saw this thread title, I immediately began to think about this.
Certain subjects tend to stick out in my mind, and kickers have long been one. I have always felt that kickers and defenses.....well they tend to go a bit under appreciated.
People tend to be a "set it and forget it" type of personality, and the bold few that try and stream heavily, or "semi-stream" (something I casually mentioned a few years ago) they often get a significant edge on the others. True, some years it just doesn't work out, but when streaming works, having a "theoretical" 5 point edge every week is
massive over the "non streamer".
Anyway, I think there has been such a problem with high end receivers this year, I think there has to be a correlation there somewhere. Look at some of the teams that either have A - a high end WR that just isn't producing, or B - WRs and in general offenses that aren't moving the ball like we had anticipated. So I think the problem has to be a combination of "faulty WRs", and bad offenses that aren't scoring as much, leading to more FG opportunities when the team can't punch it in when they get close.
The list of "faulty" big name WRs is significant this year....and I also include injured WRs too, as part of this problem.
The Falcons are an obvious example. But I don't want to necessarily point out Matt Bryant because he just stands out to me as one who had a terrible week. He got me a " - 5 " in a matchup last week. Thankfully it didn't cost me, but I can see where it may have hurt a bunch of people.
I would think, from a knee-jerk reaction, that if we could somehow find some data on how often teams "stalled" in the red zone, and we compared that from a bunch of years recently, it might help us figure this out...maybe.
I think this is very interesting, and would like to see some of this "teams that stall in the red zone" data , if we could come across that. We
*MIGHT* find out some type of predictive model..... possibly.
Maybe we could identify a few factors or similar patterns, of several teams. (I.E Kickers)
Greg Zuerlein, Ryan Succop,Kai Forbath, Stephen Gostkowski, Jake Elliott, Harrison Butker, Stephen Hauschka, Wil Lutz,Robbie Gould, Chris Boswell.
Those are roughly the top 10 offhand. This is just an impulse guess, but I am figuring Lutz, Elliott, Gostkowski are just getting so many positive scoring drives that, that is part of it.
Now the others , on the other hand, I would think (again, just a guess) that there is so much "stalling" going on and not finishing drives deep in their opponents territories, they are capitalizing on a larger amount of medium-to- longer length FGs. I think many FF leagues score slightly more points, for longer FGs. So we should keep that in consideration as well.
This is interesting, and maybe someone can come up with some "teams that stall/don't finish" drives data.
TZM
