Best Kicker in the NFL and Best Kicker in NFL History

Who are the best kickers in the NFL currently and the best in NFL history?

This is kind of a fun one because determining the best kicker in the NFL is actually very straightforward. Unlike receivers, running backs, quarterbacks and other position players, kickers really only have to do one thing and that thing is naturally classified as a success or a failure. Because of this, determining the best kicker in the NFL is actually a pretty easy task. Just determine who made the most field goals adjusted for difficulty and we get our results.

This article will take you through the whole process from the development of a model to assign value to how good a kicker is to the eventual conclusions where we determine who the best kicker in the NFL is. To determine the best kicker in the NFL, we’ll look back over a few years of data to get a large enough sample size. Then, we’ll look back as far as we can to try to determine the best kicker in NFL history. And, for a fun last step, in addition to looking at the best kicker in NFL history we’ll look at the worst kicker in NFL history.

Let’s start by looking at the results and save the methodology for later. Quickly, the metric we used at length is ‘kicks made above average’ (KMAA). This metric is how many kicks a particular player made relative to an average kicker given the exact same opportunities. A large number indicates being more accurate than average on a large number of opportunities.

To skip ahead to the tables summarizing all our results, please use the following links:

• Best kicker in NFL (2021-2022)
• Best kicker in NFL history
• Worst kicker in NFL history
• Best kicker in each decade

Current Best Kicker in the NFL

An average NFL kicker will have a KMAA of 0. The best kicker in the 2021 season was, as you probably guessed, Justin Tucker. Justin Tucker has widely been considered the best kicker in the NFL for a few years now. Even better for Justin Tucker, because the Ravens let him kick fairly liberally, he is the best kicker in both KMAA and KMAA per attempt. Tucker is about 10% more accurate per attempt than the NFL’s average kicker. That is crazy good. The other kickers who finished in the top 5 in KMAA this season are shown in the table below.

It is fascinating that there is less correlation between the most accurate kickers and the top fantasy kickers than I would expect. Sure, Justin Tucker was the third best kicker in fantasy this year. But, the top 2 kickers were Daniel Carlson and Nick Folk. Both of these guys are only about 2% more accurate than an average kicker. They are, respectively, the 16th and 17th best kickers in the league in our new KMAA metric. This is why kickers are often difficult to value in fantasy: it is a mix of opportunity and skill.

How does this data stack up with what we saw in the 2020-2021 season? The table below show the data for the 2020 season computed in the exact same way. Doing so shows a pretty significant variance from year to year. Observe that in the 2020-2021 season, Justin Tucker was not the best kicker by either metric. This is because there can be very high volatility in KMAA from one season to the next. It just takes making a few more kicks than normal to have an above average season.

In fact, in the 2020-20201 season, the best kicker in the league was Miami’s own Jason Sanders. In fact, Justin Tucker was all the way down to 8th in KMAA per attempt and fifth in total KMAA. Still, though, being top 5 back to back years is fairly impressive. Justin Tucker is pretty safely the best kicker in the current NFL, but where does he stack up in the list of best kickers in NFL history?

Historical Best Kickers by Decade

We went through each decade since the NFL merger – 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and 2010 to present – and determined who the best kickers were via the metric made kicks above average. Let’s start way back in the 1960s.

Back in the 1960s, kicking field goals was much, much less common. Most kickers in the 60s only attempted about 60-70 field goals over the course of the entire decade. For reference, this year Daniel Carlson attempted 43 field goals in a single season. Part of this discrepancy is that kickers have gotten much, much better in the last 60 years. In the 1960s, kickers only made 62% of their kicks in the 20-29 yard category. This last year, that number is safely in the 97-98% range. The table below shows the top 5 kickers in KMAA in the 1960s.

Come the 1970s, kickers got much better and started to be used much more liberally. In particular, the elites began to separate themselves from the pack – from the average kickers – a little bit more. The best kicker in the 1970s was Garo Yepremian who made almost 2.5 times more KMAA than the best kicker in the 1960s. Garo Yepremian also had almost twice as much KMAA as even the second best kicker in the 1970s. This is going to end up being one of the most dominant decades by an individual kicker we’ll see.

The 1980s were quite similar to the 1970s for kickers. Kickers continued to get a little bit more accurate, but their usage rates did not increase dramatically from the 70s to the 80s. The best kicker of the 1980s was Nick Lowery. However, Nick Lowery did not dominate the 1980s nearly as much as Garo Yepremian dominated the 1970s.

The biggest change heading into the 1990s was that the usage of kickers increased dramatically. In the 1980s, the best kicker Nick Lowery only attempted about 250 kicks. In the 1990s, the best kicker was Pete Stoyanovich who had more than twice as many attempts. Interestingly, though, Pete Stoyanovich’s KMAA was lower than Nick Lowery’s in the 80s. To me, this indicates that in the 80s there were only a few really good kickers while in the 90s the rest of the ‘league average’ kickers caught up quite a bit.

Coming closer to the modern day, the kickers continue to get better. The best kicker in the NFL in the 2000-2010 period was Jeff Wilkins of the super bowl champion Rams. So far, Jeff Wilkins has posted the second best KMAA in a decade behind only Garo Yepremian. However, this trend will change when we get to the 2010s.

Coming into modern day, the arrival of Justin Tucker has heralded the dawn of the most dominant kicker in NFL History. Even though this period covers 12 years instead of 10, even dividing by 1.2 Justin Tucker still posted the best stretch for a kicker in NFL history. His 42.3 KMAA is an astronomical number. While Garo Yepremian had more KMAA/attempt, Justin Tucker has simply accrued such a significant amount of KMAA that he is almost certain to go down as the best kicker in NFL history.

Side Note: Before I hear it from the Bears fans, Robbie Gould has been a top 5 NFL kicker since 2010. I’m sorry the double doink happened, but he was still a great kicker.

Best Kicker in NFL History

While there is little suspense as to who is the best kicker in NFL history, perhaps the rest of the top 5 is a little bit of a mystery. The decade champions were Jim Bakken, Garo Yepremian, Nick Lowery, Pete Stoyanovich, Jeff Wilkins, and Justin Tucker. How many of them make our top 5 all time?

Before showing the table, note that these rankings represent the top 5 kickers in NFL history by how well they dominated relative to their time period. If you look at pure accuracy versus distance, the top 5 kickers would likely be the exact same as the top 5 in the 2010-present period. The kickers are just so much better now than they were in the past, this isn’t a fun comparison. So, the table below contains the 5 best kickers in NFL history judged by how dominant they were in their time.

Not only does Justin Tucker take the top slot, he has the most kicks made above average of any kicker ever on fewer attempts than anyone else near the top. So, not only is Justin Tucker the best because he has so many opportunities, he is extremely efficient on the opportunities he’s given. Justin Tucker is indisputably the best kicker in NFL history. And, as Tucker is still young (only 32), he still has a significant amount of time to widen the gap between himself and other kickers.

It is fascinating to me that every kicker in the top 5 has a name that starts with a J.

It is perhaps more fascinating to me that Adam Vinatieri is nowhere on this list. Vinatieri has some claim: he has attempted the most kicks in NFL history (second is Stephen Gostkowski). Moreover, Adam Vinatieri has made some truly iconic kicks in his time. Most lists unsupported by data usually have Vinatieri near the top.

However, while he was an above average kicker, he was not significantly above average. Over the course of his 1,767 career kicks, Adam Vinatieri only accrued 8.5 KMAA. That is, over those 1,700+ kicks, he only made 8 more kicks than an average kicker would have. On the other hand, Justin Tucker has less than half the attempts but has more than five times as much KMAA as Vinatieri. So, I’m sorry Colts and Patriots fans, Adam Vinatieri is not and should not be considered on the greatest of all time list. Longevity only counts if you were good for the whole time (see: Lebron James, Kareem, Brady, etc.)

Worst Kicker in NFL History

Also interesting is the worst kicker in NFL history by the metric KMAA. To have the most negative KMAA means that a player has to be worse than league average for a very long period of time. That is hard to do. If you are too bad, you’ll get cut and stop getting opportunities to kick. If you’re too close to average, you won’t be able to accrue enough misses. That is, the worst kicker in NFL history needs to be bad enough to miss more kicks than he should but good enough to not get cut.

John Hall has the pleasure of making 15 fewer kicks than a league average kicker would have made over the course of his career. John Hall takes our title for the worst kicker in NFL history. I would like to point out for the sake of these guys that they aren’t truly the worst kickers, they are simply those who were slightly below average for long enough to rack up a lot more misses than they should have.

Best Kicker Metric

Having presented our results, I want to talk a little bit about the metric KMAA and how we used it to determine the best kickers in the NFL. The basic idea is fairly simple. A good kicker is one who makes more kicks than the average kicker would given the same opportunities. The best kicker in the NFL and therefore the best kicker in NFL history are those who over the course of their career make significantly more kicks than they would be expected to.

In order to determine the best kickers in the NFL, we need a way to figure out what an average kicker is capable of. Because of the different way data exists on pro-football-reference.com before and after the 1994 season, we have to do this in two different ways.

For seasons after 1994 we have access to actual play-by-play data. That is, we know every kick attempted by every kicker and precisely how many yards the attempt was from. Thus, given a list of predictive variables (the kick distance) and success/failure, the most natural model to use is logistic regression. We’ve used logistic regression before to analyze betting trends and when discussing passer rating and total QBR. We built a model to estimate the probability of making a kick based on its distance.

For seasons before 1994, we only have access to coarser data: whether the kick was attempted in the 0-19, 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, or 50+ ranges. Thus, to estimate the probability of a kick, we have to figure out which bin it falls into and the probability of making a kick in that bin. It isn’t a perfect system, but it works well enough for our purposes.

Once we have the probability of making a particular kick, then for each kicker we add up the average number of kicks made and look at how many were actually made by that kicker. The difference is the parameter we call kicks made above average or KMAA.

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