No Kickers Campaign for September 2011

This is a very simple argument.  There is no skill involved in having kickers.  They detract from the fantasy experience.  They were originally included because a fantasy football team was intended to resemble a real football team when in fact this whole thing probably started in someone's basement.  Since the realism of your roster is no longer anything close to a priority, don't argue with me on this. There really is no use for them...at all.  Let me break this down with numeral examples:

1) Everyone in fantasyland tells you not to draft a kicker until the last round because the top kicker and the 10th kicker in 2009 had a 25 point differential, which breaks down to less than two points per week.  

Now that I think about it, why are they paying these guys?
It would be much more interesting if skill position
players had to do the kicking.

2) Who gets the top kicker from last year (me) is due only because of the draft position in the last round, and people basically choose their kicker based purely on 2009 rankings or home team heart strings.  If we drafted every other position based purely on 2009 performance, we would be doing what ESPN does with rookies/new starters who they expect to perform like whoever was at their position previously (looking at you Kevin Kolb), and we can, no doubt, all agree that is silliness. 

Jeff Reed plays fantasy football.
Should he be able to draft himself?

3) Week to week, kickers vary incredibly and they can make the difference between winning and losing.  But if you refer to point #1, there is little difference between the kickers when its all summed up.  Look at this week's scoreboard.  Kickers ranged from 2 points to 14.  In Chandler and Fuller's matchup of pathetic showings, David Akers had as many points as Vernon Davis. Why should Chandler be rewarded for picking Akers when Fuller has the NO kicker Hartley? Is Akers a better pick?  No, it's just the way shit turned out this week. Randomly.    

Do you really want to worry about a guy like this?

While you could argue that luck is implicit in any fantasy football victory, I will argue that it is not pure luck.  This is not a game of roulette and there are patterns and predictors:  tangible metrics.  After that is a bunch of torn ACLs and secret steroid injections and the result of breeding the strongest and fastest men for a hundred years. As for kickers, it is a roll of the dice each week with no payoff at the end of the season.  Why bother?  Let us be smarter.  Let us be better.  No more f---ing kickers.

Submitted by Chris Henry's X-treme Parkour (Judd)