Back and better than ever! This is the 2024 installment of my annual tradition of ranking all of the kickers of college football with the help of a value-added metric. With some technical improvements and many many field goals to comb through, I'm happy to be back for another year.
Snap, hold, kick.
The same as it ever was, kicking is. To borrow from last year: in a sport that is full of seemingly endless unseen complexities, kicking is the outlier. The pure antithesis of modern day football. No route trees to memorize, no snap counts to predict, no exotic coverages to throw out, no boxes to stack, no blocking schemes to utilize, none of that.
Snap, hold, kick.
Sure, the act of snapping, holding, and kicking do, in and of themselves, entail more than meets the eye, but not much. With less cerebral eye candy comes more understanding from the casual observer, and with more understanding from the casual observer comes the preconceived notion that kicking is a binary game. Your team is either blessed with a good kicker, or they aren't.
Snap, hold, kick.
But as it so often is, the answers tend to lie in the between, a space kickers have been increasingly occupying less of. But what if we wanted to look deeper?
The last few years, I've used Total Added Value (TAV for short) as my answer to figure out who's the best, who's not, and who falls somewhere in the middle.
Let's run it back.
The Data
This year, I took a more technical approach to data collection. Using the College Football Data API and some Python, I was able to pull in all kicks attempted by college kickers (in the FBS) on the season, and have formatted it similar to years past, leading to a few significant upgrades:
Distances are now in buckets of 5 yards (20-24, 25-29, etc) up to 60 and above, rather than 10 yards.
Rather than keeping a minimum number of FGA required to be ranked, I have instead been able to take the kicker with the most attempts for each team. This means for the first time all 134 FBS teams are taking part in the final tally.
At the same time, all kicks by any college kicker (whether they qualify for their team's spot in the rankings or not), have been used to calculate the expected values of each distance bucket.
There were a lot of field goals this year; in fact, across the FBS there were 1,771 makes on 2,291 total attempts. Good for a 77% success rate overall, but what's more important for our rankings is how that success rate changes with distance.
Rarely does data present itself so cleanly, but in this case the expected conclusion is fairly cut and dry. As distance increases, successful conversion rate, and therefore the expected value of any given kick, decreases in turn. Using these, we calculate our expected values for kicks by distance bucket in the 2024 season.
Value Calculation
The formula for a kicker's added value has remained unchanged, and is still fairly simple.
Actual Value = FGM * Actual Point Value of Kick
Expected Value = FGA * Expected Point Value of Kick
Added Value = Actual Value - Expected Value
Let's run through a short example to show this in practice, considering Cincinnati kicker Nathan Hawks' 2024 season. On the surface, Hawks went a respectable 13/17 on the year, but what about his added value?
1.78 points of Added Value for Hawks, coming in at 57th out of the 134 FBS kickers. While he was able to amass value both up close and at range, the middle distances were more of a struggle for him. Nevertheless, an above average kicker and an above average season.
Now that we've set the stage, let's look at the total landscape.
Final Rankings
Below is the 2024 Value-Added College Football Kicker Rankings:
Let's zoom in.
2024's Best College Kickers
Another year of fantastic kickers. These 10 combined to make 188 field goals on 205 attempts, good for just shy of a 92% conversion rate.
Winner Winner..
Congratulations of Kenneth Almendares of Louisiana for being the #1 Ranked FBS kicker of 2024!
With just shy of 14 points of added value, he was well clear of almost the entire field. For Almendares, the formula for domination was twofold. Firstly, as to be expected, he didn't miss many kicks. Only twice on the season did Almendares not split the uprights, from 53 and 60, so minimal costliness as well. On top of that, he amassed the 5th most attempts on the season with 29. 27 for 29 will get you top spot pretty much any year, regardless of distance. This isn't to say he was a short-yardage specialist, as you can see below Almendares a model of consistency and a pure tour-de-force from within 50 yards.
A lot of green with very little red. A very, very successful season for Almendares, who looks to take home the Lou Groza award to boot.
The Gift of Distance
Congratulations are also in order for the 2024 runner-up, Michigan's Dominic Zvada! The only kicker other than Almendares on the year with 13 or more points of Added Value on the year, Zvada arrived at his spot on the leaderboard in a much different fashion than our winner.
Naturally, a kicker gains significant value from longer makes. Zvada’s 2024 season has gone on record as perhaps the greatest embodiment of this principle I’ve ever seen.
7/7 from beyond 50. 7/7!
As such, Zvada was the only kicker within spitting distance of the top spot, doing so on 11 fewer attempts than Almendares.
In fact, had a 28 yarder against Illinois not been blocked for his only miss on the season, Zvada would’ve taken the top spot.
Almendares made several more kicks, and therefore is well deserving of his most value-added distinction, but as the comparison below shows, Zvada excelled from range in a way Almendares didn't exhibit, leading to a very close finish.
Missing Where It (Doesn't) Matter
Ben Sauls missed the most kicks of any player in the top 10 this year with 3, yet he managed a third place finish. How?
Unlike pretty much every high volume kicker, short-distance kicks were not what added considerable value to Sauls' TAV. In fact, he only attempted 2 of his 21 kicks on the year from within 35 yards, easily the fewest for those with a similar FGA number, as is seen in the chart below.
As such, his misses weren't very costly and his makes only helped him more. This proved to be the difference between him and Western Kentucky's Lucas Carneiro for the bronze.
It is definitely worth calling out Carneiro's 6/6 in the 50-54 yard bucket. These 6 kicks alone amassed over 8 points of his added value, the most of any kicker in any specific yardage bucket on the season. As the fourth most valuable kicker in the FBS in 2024, he very clearly had an amazing season in his own right. If Carneiro had had more mid-range attempts, it's possible we could be looking at a different podium.
Back to Back
Lastly, a quick shoutout is deserved by Miami's Andreas Borregales. His 8th place finish means he's the only kicker to have placed in the top 10 in 2023 and return to repeat the feat in 2024. Consistent as ever, Borregales did this by being one of only four kickers on the year who did not have a negative added value across any distance bucket, joining aforementioned Ben Sauls, as well as Charlotte's Stephan Rusnak and Kentucky's Alex Raynor, both of whom narrowly missed out on the top 10 this year.
2024's Worst College Kickers
Unfortunately, as it is above, so it is below. These 10 kickers combined to make 100 kicks on 167 attempts, a sub 60% conversion rate.
With Apologies To...
Sam Houston State's Christian Pavon, who with fewer than -14 points of added value has set a new ranking record for the worst performance in the 5 years of this rankings history. Solidly steady within 30 yards, things unraveled with distance for Pavon, who was called on to make 10 kicks from outside of 40, making only 4.
...As Well As...
Auburn's Towns McGough. While certainly a unanimous selection to the FBS All-Name team, McGough struggled early and often and was eventually even benched in favor of Ian Vachon, who would finish the year out 6/8 in a strong performance.
This isn't to say this falls solely on McGough, as the Auburn coaching staff time and again trotted him out to attempt kicks likely beyond what would be advisable. He attempted 4 kicks from beyond 50 yards, matching his count from between 30 and 50.
Side note: I would like to lodge a formal complaint with the record keeping for field goals in CFB. McGough's respectable 61 yard miss at the end of the first half against California is, for some reason, logged both on ESPN's website and all sources I can find as a 17 yard miss. Until this was uncovered in further fact checking, McGough was on pace to set an all-time poor value per kick mark.
...And Lastly
Wisconsin's Nathanial Vakos and USC's Michael Lantz, for whom consistency was but a brief, fleeting concept.
Firstly, there was Vakos, who was nearly perfect within 35, perfect from 50 and beyond, and nearly entirely imperfect in between.
And Lantz, who with a final tally of 14 makes on 21 attempts, made the most kicks of anyone unlucky enough to grace this section of the article. Despite making from both near and far, he couldn't do it consistently.
A flurry of a makes from inside 25, only to have a flurry of misses from 26-30. A few makes from beyond 40, but almost always accompanied by a miss at that same distance.
Flip the 3 misses from 26-30 to makes, as you could reasonably expect from an FBS kicker, and we'd ben having a different conversation about an average at worst kicker who couldn't just put it together from distance.
With The Laces Out: Interesting Findings
Graham Nicholson: The Tradeoff of Transferring
Last year, Graham Nicholson had it all, assuming "all" was the top spot in the rankings, as well as a Lou Groza award to boot. Nicholson, who attempted 28 kicks in 2023, was given ample opportunity by the staff of Miami (OH) and rose to the occasion nearly every time.
However, this season painted a different story. Nicholson clocks in as the 70th ranked kicker in the FBS, just above average at a comparatively measly 0.309 points of added value. What happened?
In the offseason, amidst some fiery accusations of tampering from the M-(OH) coach, Nicholson transferred to Alabama to play under first-year Tide HC Kalen DeBoer. During his year in Tuscaloosa, Nicholson spent much more time kicking extra points than field goals, as Bama's prolific offense simply didn't necessitate that field goals be attempted.
In 2023, Nicholson attempted 28 field goals and 37 extra points.
In 2024, it was 8 field goals, and 52 extra points.
It's been discussed before. Often in reference to a team like Alabama or Ohio State, being a kicker in a high-powered offense can be a bit of a detractor to your stats. You simply aren't needed as often, and get fewer opportunities to prove yourself. Nicholson is this year's most notable exemplar of this notion.
Maddux Trujillo and the 60 Yard Club
Below is the comprehensive list of all FBS kickers to make a field goal of at least 60 yards in the 2024 season:
Arizona's Tyler Loop
Texas State's Mason Shipley
Colorado State's Jordan Noyes
Temple's Maddux Trujillo
Of the four, Trujillo stood alone as the only kicker to convert more than once from 60 yards in the 2024 season. In fact, of his 3.319 points of added value, 3.5 points could be attributed to these 60 yarders. This is to say that without those, he would have been considered a below average kicker. Heck of a way to shed that notion.
Perfection in Charlotte
A special shoutout to Charlotte's Stephen Rusnak, the only FBS kicker on the season to be perfect, going 11 for 11 on the year. His steady foot across all distances led him in fact to be the 12th ranked kicker on the year, and he was even able to one-up Dominic Zvada for the most points of added value gained on a per attempt basis.
At the end of it all, it's been another wonderful season for an incredible batch of kickers. The minutiae between the average to the good to the great really was just that, minutiae. Several kickers had claims to incredible seasons, and several of them were right.
That being said, it's a moot point.
After all: it's Kenneth Almendares' world, and they're just living in it.
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