You’re coach/GM of a professional football team. You have two kickers on the roster but you only have final roster space for one.
Kicker A kicks a well above-average percentage of field goals, but is terrible on kickoffs, consistently resulting in poor defensive field position.
Kicker B kicks just an average percentage of field goals, but consistently kicks unreturnable kickoffs (99% touchbacks).
Who do you keep?
Can the punter handle kickoffs? That’s what the Saints do. Otherwise, I take the big leg with average accuracy.
I’m no football strategist, but points is points. Even if Kicker A gives the other team a start on their own 35 yard line on every kickoff, points is still points.
Can you quantify “poor defensive field position”? Average start on the 25? The 40?
What’s the FG specialist’s range?
The 40 yard line, give or take 5 yards.
From 45 yards down, he almost never misses (99%). He can hit consistently from 50 - 55, ~90%. Above that, he’s got an above-average chance of hitting.
Those are not going to be his career numbers, he’ll decline with age of course, but he’ll maintain those numbers at least through his prime years.
This question is kind of out of date after the rule changes of recent years.
The NFL moved the line for kicking off from the 30 to the 35, and changed the rule so that defenders can only be 5 yards behind the kicker when kicking off from 10. So far more kickoffs are already touchbacks and the defense has lost a huge advantage in getting a running start to defend.
Average starting position after kickoffs went from the 29 yard line to the 22 after the change. Eliminating the risk of fumbles may be worth making every touchback a better play than trying a return.
Not doing the math, but it seems that even a slightly better FG% is worth the 2 yard increase in kickoff advantage gained from a return (not counting fumbles.)
Depends, of course. The difference between being at the 20 and being at the 40 is roughly one and a half points. So for every two touchbacks your touchback guy is gonna get you, you need the field goal specialist to hit an extra field goal you couldn’t get from an average field goal kicker to bring you level. I doubt that’s going to happen. Give me the touchbacks.
edit - wait, 90% from 55 yards? Shit, never mind, give me that guy.
Yeah, what Jimmy said. If I never have to punt from the sunny side of the 40, I’ll give up the extra field position.
In a less extreme case, it depends on the relative strengths of my offense and defense. If I have a defense that gives me the ball back after 3 plays, I don’t care too much about field position and I’ll take the FG guy. If I have an offense like New Orleans, I take the kickoff specialist; if they’re more like Baltimore, I take the FG guy.
Keep kicker A no contest.
By law of averages you can go to the draft/free agency and find decent enough defensive players who can keep the ball out of your own endzone despite bad field position.
But a nigh guaranteed kicker? That’s rarer than…what? Gold? Platinum? Platinum plated golden silver?
He basically described the best kicker to ever lace them up. Not a good benchmark.
In the real world, a average NFL team kicks off 5-6 times per game. If you’re giving up 15-20 extra yards on every kickoff and risking return TDs that’s basically a 100 yards per game and a 1 or 2 return TDs a season. I’m sure there’s a more rigorous analysis of this, but every 100 yards is worth 6-7 points. Unless your “average kicker” is making at least 2 fewer FGs per game than the “excellent” one, field position wins. It’s not even close.
Nowadays, even the “average” kickers are pretty dang good at converting field goals inside the 40, and better than ever outside the 40.
I’ll take an “average” place kicker who can pin the opponent deep in their own territory. After all, a guy with a mighty leg can eventually LEARN to be more accurate. A weaker guy can’t learn to kick a mile.
Not entirely true. Robbie Gould had trouble getting touchbacks in his first few seasons, now he’s a out of the back of the end zone guy.
This site can help quantify such questions. A graph at the linked page shows that it’s worth about 1 point to start from the 40-yard line instead of from the 20. Kicking off five times a game on average, the bad kicker would give up 5 points per game if the opponents always get to the 40 (± 5) on his kickoff.
An average field goal kicker will attempt less than two per game, on average, for about 5 points average. A very good field goal kicker will attempt more than two, for about 7 points total on average, enjoying perhaps a 2-point advantage over the average kicker. (These numbers are wild guesses, but the 2-point difference should be in the ballpark.) But that ignores that without the good kicker, the team would have played differently: punting or trying for a touchdown.
Conclusion: the long kicker is definitely better, based on a very cursory skim of the interesting statistics available at the linked site.
No, it’s the norm.
The NFL average under 40 yards last season was 89.7% Over 50 yards, they’re still at 67%. The average NFL team attempted 32 FGs last season, including 4.5 over 50.
Changing that rate inside the 40 to 95% is worth about 1 FG a season. If his keeps his 95% rate over 50, and assuming the team tries twice as many FGs over 50 because they know how great he is, that’s 2.5 more 5FGs a season.
So, the super-accurate kicker is worth 11 points a season, or about .6 a game. As Septimus notes, one bad kickoff can negate that.
Now if the accurate guy was 90% accurate out to 60 or 65, that would be something else … but he’d have to have a huge leg to do that, which would make him great at kickoffs.
50 years ago, when the league average was 50% and you had non-specialists doing toe-kicking, there was a real advantage to finding a guy who could hit on 75%. Nowadays, the skill and technique level is much, much higher, and there are literally a couple hundred street free agents that can come in and hit at that rate. The marginal value of a more-accurate kicker drops every year.
The problem with the question isn’t with the FG%, it’s the assumption that the kicker will give up the ball on the 40 yard line on average. It’s established that the kicker is deadly accurate kicking the ball 55 yards with a snap, a limited run-up, and a wall of large men trying to block the kick, but can’t seem to get any more distance with a stationary, perfectly positioned ball, a long run-up, and no rush.
Even if the kicker has a hard limit of 55 yards per kick, the defense is still allowing 30 yards per return. That seems it would be the fault of the other special teamers, not the kicker.
The parameters given in post #5 are pretty unrealistic, so I’ll answer more generally: I would tend to favor the good kickoffs guy, since kickoff distance is one of the least variable stats in football, while FG% is one of the *most *variable stats. In other words, the kickoff guy may or not be good on FGs in the long run, but I can count on the value from his kickoffs. The FG guy may or may not be good on FGs in the long run, but I can count losing value every time he kicks off.
I think you’re overvaluing the amount of TDs that happen on kickoffs, and how much is really the fault of the kicker.
I’m sure you or someone else can have stats ans sabremetrics about how you should take the deep-kick guy, but I’ll stand by what I said:
If I have a good enough defense and special teams (around the kicker), but I’m practically guaranteed 3 points every time I cross the 40 yard line, I’m going to take the points and assume that my offense can gain 40 yards (from the 20 to the 40) every time they get the ball…at worst
You already HAVE that practical guarantee. I did the math above. If you’re playing in the NFL in 2014, once you cross the 40 the league average is about 85%. Even if your kicker was 95%, that adds about 1 FG a month.
If the OP was asking about a kicker that was guaranteed to always hit on every everything under 60 – 100% – then it would be more of a question, or if the kickoff guy was not league-average on FGs, but well below it.
Of course as a practical matter, this is all moot: any guy with the leg strength to hit FGs accurately at 55 is going to be good on kickoffs – IRL, missed long FGs are often missed short. A weak-legged guy, however accurate, is also going to hurt you in the FG game by limiting your range.
I would go for the FG kicker - there’s going to be a time where those 3 points mean the difference between winning and losing. Besides, you have to take into account that missing a FG results in giving the other team good field position.
You also might want to consider the possibility that the NFL might change its rules again and move kickoffs back five yards - so much for those “automatic touchbacks”.
There is a HUGE difference between 85 and 90 percent when it comes to FGs that long. Besides, in the small 5% that he does miss the field goal, the resulting field position for the other team is the exact same that the kicker who sucks would get you, although minus the points.
If we’re playing the extrapolating game, why not try for 60-65 yard field goals at that point? If he can bomb 50-55 yarders with no problems and with accuracy, why not try a field goal almost every single time? The resulting field position will be the same as his shitty kickoff, and you might even net some yards if the other team tries catching the ball and running it for a TD, which might have happened anyway.
Playing for field position instead of taking points is what gets coaches in trouble a lot of times, and I just can’t sacrifice guaranteed points on the grounds of “field position probably costs points”