An Analysis of Placekicker Salary Distribution in the NFL

This contribution comes from the desk of Dan Schlauch.

Abstract:

The importance of an effective kicking game in the NFL is undeniable. Kickers are regularly the highest scoring players on a team and are repeatedly asked to perform in key situations of high stakes. The difference between the best performing kicker (Janikowski) and the worst performing kicker (Brown) in 2009 totaled over 35 points, which would likely make the difference in several games. Additionally, the mean salary of kickers was the lowest in the NFL at just over $1.5 million.

However, despite these considerations, this analysis shows that kickers receive a disproportionately high percentage of team salary and that money spent on kickers has a startlingly low return on investment.

Re-Launch: Community 2.0

About a year and a half ago, I launched Advanced NFL Stats Community, a site where anyone could contribute a post. It received a few dozen submissions, some more interesting than others, and it was a great start. Unfortunately, the time I devoted to reformatting the articles and their tables of data took away time I wanted to spend on other projects. I decided to gradually let the site fade into the background.

But one of my goals continues to be helping building a collaborative community of football stat heads without “premium” content or “proprietary” black-box stats, and I’d like to offer readers a platform for sharing ideas and analysis. In the recent off-season, I completed a long-standing goal of building an open NFL play-by-play database suitable for research and making available to everyone. Immediately, readers started parsing the data, adding fields for various things, and  sharing their insights in the comments section of the post.