Kickers

In football, Kickers are the specialists who are responsible for scoring Field Goals and Extra Points. Kickers are believed to put the "foot" in football, quite literally. Although there are innumerable factors that come into play when an attack is trying to score points, the onus is on Kickers to put the points on the scoresheet and consequently every season the odds of a Kicker ending up at the top of the points scoring charts are much higher compared to any other position.

Field Goals

A field goal is a long distance way of scoring points in football. The attacking team can choose to attempt a field goal from anywhere on the pitch, although scoring a field goal beyond the 50 yard line is just impossible. If the ball passes through the U shaped goal post, it's a goal and the team receives 3 points.

Kickers are on the field goal duty, and the teams are banking on their prowess to score points. The NFL Big Data Bowl dataset had over a hundred Kickers playing in various teams. To track down the kickers who are doing exceptionally well and to rank them, we focused particularly on two parameters, i.e., their conversion rates and their average kick lengths.

The conversion rate is determined by finding the proportion of 'good kicks' out of the total number of kicks attempted, grouped by each player. Kick lengths are pivotal in judging a kicker's ability, as farther away you are from the goal past, more difficult it is to bag a goal. And as a consequence, teams that have kickers who can score points from long range do have an advantage. To eliminate the anomalies, the kickers with less than 10 kick attempts were not considered.

As evident from the scatter plot above, the kickers on the top right are doing exceptionally well. The average kick length for these lot are over 32 yards, and on top of that the conversion rate is over 90%. On the contrary, an average NFL kicker would lie somewhere in the middle of the plot.

In order to rank these kickers, it would make most sense to compute a product of the conversion rate and the average kick length as these parameters are detrimental in judging a kicker's ability. And this would fetch the following results as shown in the bar plot below. The Y-axis represents the computed metric, and based on it Graham Gano is our absolute kicker. Graham Gano scores 94 out of 100 times and on top of that, his average kick length is whooping 36.7 yards!

The Yards Covered

One of the most intrinsic part of football is covering field position. The closer you are to the end zone, better are your chances of scoring a touchdown or a field goal. When the kicking team attempts a kick, the defense can catch the ball and cover some ground in the opposing direction. The net yards metric would indicate how much ground the kicking team is able to cover by computing the length of the kick and eliminating the number of return yards covered by the opposition out of it.

The above bar plot signifies the average net yards covered per kick grouped by each player. The players in the green zone are delivering the best output for their teams, clocking an average net yards covered of over 40 yards, which is a substantial number on the football field. Conversely, the players in the red zone are doing the worst, some even have negative net yards covered. The mean for this metric lies around 28 yards, and the median is 23 yards, which demonstrates how significantly better the players are in the green zone.

Page updated

Report abuse