Should We Be Playing Kickers More in NFL Showdown?

Nothing says NFL showdown quite like Chris Boswell scoring 26 DraftKings points in an 18-10 win over the Falcons, where the lone offensive highlight was a 41-yard pass, setting up Boswell’s third field goal of the first half.

You needed a shower at 11:00 p.m. CT to rinse off the stench of that game, but if you rostered Boswell, you were doing so with a few more dollars in your pocket. That’s the question this article will answer: Should we be rostering kickers more in NFL showdown?

Historical ownership pushes back on that assumption: 64.1% of all primetime NFL showdown lineups in the DraftKings flagship contest roster no kickers. The position, even in our analysis of them, often gets dismissed as a shrug or the last piece you click in when you’ve already built a lineup you like. That dismissal may have worked in the past, but it’s becoming harder to defend now.

The NFL’s kickoff rule was overhauled in 2024 and changed again in 2025, along with a revamp of the K-Ball preparation rules that have resulted in a change to how kickers are producing fantasy points, resulting in more field goal attempts, improved accuracy, expanded range, and better DraftKings scoring on a per-game basis. Have our opponents priced those things in?

We’ll use our database of 22.4 million weighted contest entries across nearly 200 primetime NFL showdown slates from 2020-2025 to give us an answer for how the DFS field is handling it, and a play-by-play dataset of the kick detail covering 5,594 field goal attempts and 6,438 extra point attempts from all NFL games since 2021 to answer the real-world impact.

PART 1: What The Contest Database Shows

Pre-2025

Before we figure out if the DFS field has adjusted, we need to establish a baseline of what they’ve done historically to identify how it’s changed and whether it’s changed enough. Given the rule changes before the 2025 season, it makes sense to split our contest database into two cohorts: 2021-24 and 2025.

Pre-2025, at least one kicker in FLEX lineups accounted for 33.5% of all lineups submitted and finished in the top 1% at a 1.23% clip, finding a top-1% finish at a 1.15x relative rate to their field utilization. No-kicker lineups underperformed slightly (0.93x), and kicker at CPT checked in as the worst of the three constructions with just a 0.78x rate.

2025