Grace Hollars/IndyStar / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Spencer Shrader has scored more fantasy football points than Ja'Marr Chase so far this season
Ask an NFL player what a kicker does all day at practice, and they’ll likely be largely unsure if not downright dismissive. Why? Because kicking units are virtually siloed from the rest of their teammates. They are the HR department of football — their relationship with the rest of the team is awkward yet crucial.
Whether or not kickers should have such vital importance in football is a long-running debate — despite essentially being adjacent to the actual sport (offense vs. defense) and featuring the team’s lowest-paid players, kicking units often decide games, even Super Bowls.
Kicking is, ultimately, an undeniable part of the game of football and will likely remain that way for the foreseeable future. In fantasy football, however, there is a debate raging about whether they should exist at all.
Fantasy football players are debating whether or not the game should even have kickers
Through the first four weeks of the 2026 NFL season, Indianapolis Colts kicker Spencer Shrader — a 27-year-old with his third team in the last three seasons — has scored more points than projected fantasy blue-chips such as Ja’Marr Chase (the top-scoring player in FF a couple years back), Omarion Hampton, Drake London, Chase Brown, Justin Jefferson, and Jeremiyah Love.
Heading into the season, ESPN didn’t even rank Shrader in its top 20 fantasy football kickers. Yahoo ranked him 23rd — compared to Chase, who was its #3 ranked player OVERALL.
A post about this stat from Underdog went viral on social media as it sparked a debate about whether or not fantasy football should even bother having a kicker position. Some people are even arguing against the defensive component of the game.
Abolish kickers (from fantasy)
— Khaled (@khaled74) October 6, 2026
If you still have kickers (or defense) in your fantasy league, your league sucks
— Matt Couture (@MattCouture5) October 7, 2026
The replies to the above viral posts, however, suggest the opinion among fantasy football players is split. I personally had one guy call me “low IQ” for abolishing kickers when I was the Commissioner of my own league (I did it about a decade ago, and it’s remained that way since — as the Joker told Batman, I’m not a monster, I’m just ahead of the curve).
The inclusion of kickers ultimately comes down to how much weight you put into the “fantasy” element of fantasy football. According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of fantasy is: the power or process of creating especially unrealistic or improbable mental images in response to psychological need or a a creation of the imagination.
Thus, by definition, fantasy football is not strictly beholden to any of the actual mechanisms of real football. One viral league, for example, has a rule where a player doing a backflip celebration costs their team “the current number of streams of Beautiful Things by Benson Boone divided by 50,000,000.”
our fantasy league has a rule where if a player does a backflip, whoever is starting him automatically loses points equal to the current number of streams of Beautiful Things by Benson Boone divided by 50,000,000. tyreek hill just lost @BoyYeetsWorld a clean 49.2 points https://t.co/0cYaeumXY8
— jacky (@JackWilliamRtF) September 19, 2025
Fantasy football can and should be whatever the league wants it to be. If that means fielding every single position that the NFL actually does, then so be it, but that also begs the question of why those kicker truthers don’t feel the same way about punters.