Click to go to the 2017 college football kicker tracker>>>
Welcome to the hub page for my college football kicker stats project.
I’ve always enjoyed following kickers’ performance compared to one another throughout the season, but I could never find week-to-week updates beyond your standard stats. I also found it curious that despite our current sports statistics revolution, very little has been done in the way of making a stat that better measures kicker performance (at least in college football).
Given that this is just a for-fun side project, creating that stat might not happen until the offseason. For now, I’ll just be updating the two leaderboards I’ve developed on the 2017 season page, posting weekly notes, and occasionally posting on Twitter.
What I’m Currently Tracking:
- Kicker Survivor: Which kicker will have the longest unblemished FG streak before missing?
- Longball Leaderboard: Who will claim the top 25 longest makes of the season?
- Every game-winning kick from the season (with links to video when possible)
- Record/milestone tracker (NCAA DI all-time)
- Groza Award probabilities (past the release of shortlist)
- Occasional FCS, DII, and DIII look-ins
Projects For The Future
Like I said above, what I really want to do is develop better stat (or multiple) to measure kicker performance. Once I feel this metric is sound in its logic, I’d then like to:
- Apply said stat to as many previous seasons as I can get data for
- Find the best season a kicker has ever had within the new metric
- Look for statistical commonalities in Groza winners
- Look for statistical commonalities in recruiting-service rated recruit vs. Kohl’s Kicking Camps attendees vs. the rest
- Look for/establish a clear correlation between FG opportunities, kicker ability, and offensive performance
Since this is just a side project, some of these things may take some time especially given math is not my strong suit. If you’d like to help (and especially if you are good with numbers), shoot me a line.