Kazu2324
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Saw an interesting twitter thread making a point that the current circus behind finding a kicker might be a lot more insignificant than it's playing out to be. What are you guys' thoughts to the current competition for the kicker position? Is it as important as it's being made out to be or is it all just media-generated hype to have something interesting for the off-season?
TL;DR - Parkey had a bad season for sure, 25th worst in the last decade based on expectations, but it wasn't as horrendous as it's being made out to be. Kickers will most often regress to the average, so while Parkey having a bad year really hurt us, he likely would have bounced back this season. Biggest issue was his contract, not having him on the team. Kickers are basically the new RBs - anyone can be slotted in and will likely play close to the average.
TL;DR - Parkey had a bad season for sure, 25th worst in the last decade based on expectations, but it wasn't as horrendous as it's being made out to be. Kickers will most often regress to the average, so while Parkey having a bad year really hurt us, he likely would have bounced back this season. Biggest issue was his contract, not having him on the team. Kickers are basically the new RBs - anyone can be slotted in and will likely play close to the average.
With every training camp news story in Chicago seemingly centered around the kicker battle, I keep tearing my hair out. Here's my thread of why our kicker is NOT our biggest issue in 2019, and why you should waste little time or effort caring about it:
First, let's take a look at how much kickers out-perform expectations once you control for distance. As you can see, Cody Parkey's season was the 25th worst in the last decade based on this metric.
The majority of kickers are close to average. Cody Parkey had a bad season, sure, but people make it seem like it was historically bad, when it clearly wasn't.
While I concede Parkey had some really untimely doinks last year, he's only been slightly below average in his entire career. Unless you're a Tucker or Aguayo fan, your kicker is probably closer to average than you think.
If you look at EPA and WPA, you can see that the impact of kickers is pretty limited. For example, Parkey's FG's led to a loss of 12 expected points over the entirety of 2018. The Bears scored 421.
Before someone brings up kickers being clutch, let's just get out ahead of it and take a look at how kickers do in clutch-time situations. Sample size is a huge issue here, but there's little evidence some kickers are "clutcher" than others, it just follow similar trendlines. %.
But THE most important point, and the point to take away if nothing else, is that a kicker's accuracy last year tells you close to nothing about his accuracy the next year! Kickers regress to the mean.
The biggest mistake was to signing Parkey to the ridiculous $15 million deal in the first place. But cutting him in hopes of a finding a new "savior" at kicker seems equally misguided. He likely would have had a better year, and we wouldn't have had to eat his dead cap.
Focusing on who our kicker will be this year is a fruitless excercise, in my humble opinion. Just find a cheap option and stick with him. Kickers are largely interchangeable, and their impact on the narrative is greater than on actually winning games.
