Ian Allan
I’m working on the 2009 magazine. Seriously. It’s what I do, and there’s a lot of prep work that needs to be in place long before any team or positional stories are written. Plus I’m going to lose some work days in the upcoming weeks to a vacation and a jury duty (that was postponed out of October).
So I’m doing some statistical work on kickers, adding the 2008 data into our existing files, and I notice that they’ve improved yet again. It happens almost every year, and this time the jump is even larger than normal.
The average kicker scored almost 116 points last year, which is almost 5 points higher than ever before. Last year, the average was almost 111 points, which was 3 points higher than ever before.
Plus, despite the addition of the K balls, they just can’t slow these guys down from making more and more kicks. Collectively, NFL kickers hit 84.5 percent of their field goals last year. That’s the fifth year in a row that kickers as a group have been more accurate than ever before.
Back when I started playing fantasy football in 1986, kickers averaged 97 points per season and averaged under 69 percent on field goals. If you convert under 70 percent nowadays, you don’t make it through the season.
The numbers from the last 25 years …
NFL KICKERS PRODUCTION, 1984-2008
Show are year, average NFL points and average field goal accuracy:
Year Points FG Pct.
1984 98.7 71.7
1985 102.2 72.2
1986 96.5 68.6
1987 95.1 70.3
1988 97.0 71.7
1989 101.0 72.5
1990 98.8 74.4
1991 100.5 73.5
1992 93.5 72.6
1993 103.4 76.6
1994 100.4 78.9
1995 108.1 77.4
1996 105.8 80.0
1997 103.9 78.1
1998 105.2 79.6
1999 106.6 77.7
2000 104.7 79.7
2001 103.4 76.3
2002 105.0 77.5
2003 105.6 79.2
2004 102.8 80.8
2005 107.8 81.0
2006 107.0 81.4
2007 110.9 82.8
2008 115.8 84.5
—Ian Allan
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Posted by Miguel Tames | Jan. 17 at 08:20 AM
I don't think this a new idea or anything, but decreasing/increasing the width of the goal posts depending on the distance of the kick sounds good to me.