Key takeaways
- The ITFFL kicker paradox has a name on it. End Of Story took the league's first kicker in four of the six seasons from 2020 to 2025, including one in round 8.
- The round 8 kicker was real. Pick 90 of 192 in 2021, with 102 picks still on the board. Across all 1,080 picks in six years, that is the only kicker ever taken in round 8.
- And it did not cost him anything. End Of Story finished 3rd that year. Over six seasons he has the best average finish of any manager in the league at 4.50, from the worst average draft slot in the six-season group.
- The manager who takes the first kicker has averaged a 5.17 finish. Better than the league-average 6.50. Six data points, so hold it loosely, but it is the opposite of the take everyone repeats.
- He also has zero titles. Which is the actual lesson: in a league where eight of twelve teams make the playoffs, being consistently good and winning trophies are two unrelated hobbies.
Somebody in this league has been taking kickers absurdly early for six years and everybody knows who it is. The bit writes itself. Round 8 kicker, what are you doing, this is why you don't win. It's a good joke and we have all told it.
The problem is that we finally went and checked, and the ITFFL kicker paradox does not resolve the way the joke needs it to. The guy committing the cardinal sin of fantasy drafting is, by average finish, the best manager this league has had. He is also the answer to "who has never won it," which turns out to be a completely separate question with a completely separate explanation.
Both things are true. Let's go through it.
The ITFFL kicker paradox, in one list
Here is every season's first kicker off the board, who took it, and where that manager finished the regular season. Remember the draft shrank: 16 rounds and 192 picks through 2022, 14 rounds and 168 picks since 2023, so the round number is the honest comparison, not the raw pick.
- 2020 — pick 135 of 192, round 12,
End Of Story→ finished 3rd - 2021 — pick 90 of 192, round 8,
End Of Story→ finished 3rd - 2022 — pick 112 of 192, round 10,
End Of Story→ finished 4th - 2023 — pick 129 of 168, round 11,
DVO92A6→ finished 6th - 2024 — pick 112 of 168, round 10,
End Of Story→ finished 11th - 2025 — pick 111 of 168, round 10,
ITFFLGOAT→ finished 4th
Four of six. Not a bit, not a one-off, a documented habit. And the finishes attached to those six picks are 3rd, 3rd, 4th, 6th, 11th and 4th, which averages out to 5.17 in a twelve-team league where the average finish is by definition 6.50. The person who jumps the kicker market in ITFFL has, on average, finished better than the field.
Before the nuance arrives, let's not lose the funniest number in the dataset. In 2021, End Of Story took a kicker at pick 90 of a 192-pick draft. That is not "a round early." That is with 102 picks still to come, more than half the draft remaining, in a league that starts three REC_FLEX spots in full PPR.
To put it in league-wide context: across all six drafts and all 1,080 picks, exactly one kicker has ever been taken in round 8, exactly one in round 9, and three in round 10. Five kickers before round 11 in six years of drafting, and the round 8 one belongs to a single manager on a single evening in 2021.
Pick 90 of 192. The kicker was taken before more than half the draft had happened. I have made peace with a lot of things in this league. I have not made peace with this.
In fairness, 2021 was a strange draft league-wide. That was also the year the first defense came off the board at pick 68, in round 6, which is the only round-6 defense in six seasons of ITFFL drafts. Something was in the water. It just did not affect anybody else's kicker.
The part that ruins the joke
End Of Story's six regular-season finishes are 3rd, 3rd, 4th, 3rd, 11th and 3rd. That is an average of 4.50, and it is the best average finish of any manager who has played all six seasons, and in fact the best of anybody with more than one season in the league. The rest of the six-year crew sits at 5.00, 6.00, 6.50, 7.00 and 7.67.
It gets worse for the joke. His average draft slot over those six years is 7.7, the worst of any six-season manager. He has been drafting from the back half of the board, taking kickers before anyone else in the league would touch one, and still finishing top four in five of six seasons in a twelve-team league.
And the one season it looked like the sin caught up with him, 2024, when he finished 11th? He took the first kicker that year in round 10, which is the same round ITFFLGOAT took the first kicker in 2025 on the way to a 4th place finish. Same round, same league, ten spots apart in the standings. The kicker did not do that.
What a round 8 kicker actually costs you
Here is the boring answer nobody wants, which is that the price of an early kicker in this specific format is smaller than the outrage suggests.
ITFFL rosters are 14 deep: QB, RB, RB, three REC_FLEX, K, DEF, and six bench. Taking a kicker in round 8 instead of round 13 does not cost you a starter. It costs you the difference between your best available round 8 player and whatever you can get in round 13 at that spot, and in a full PPR league with three flex spots, what most managers are actually buying in round 8 is a fourth or fifth receiver who spends the year on the bench.
The real cost is optionality, not points, and optionality is worth something. It is just not worth the six years of abuse we have collectively assigned to it. The round-by-round data backs this up in a slightly humiliating way: rounds 12 through 14 account for 40 of the league's kicker picks across six seasons, which means the market clears late and reliably, which means jumping it early is genuinely a waste. It is a waste of about one bench slot. Not a season.
Consistency and titles are two different hobbies
So if End Of Story is this good, where is the trophy? He does not have one. Six seasons, five top-four finishes, zero titles.
This is not a kicker problem. It is a structure problem, and everybody in this league is subject to it. Eight of twelve teams make the ITFFL playoffs. Two thirds of the field gets in. The regular season, which is the thing End Of Story keeps winning, mostly just determines seeding for a bracket that then does whatever it wants.
Look at what the bracket has actually done. The six champions finished 8th, 4th, 7th, 2nd, 4th and 1st in their title-winning regular seasons. Only one of six was also the best team over the full season. One of them won it from eighth place at 5-8. And in 2020 a team went 13-0 and did not win the title. If that is the machine, then "most consistently good" and "most trophies" were never going to be the same list, and holding a manager's ring count against his drafting is a category error.
That is a whole argument in itself, and it gets its own posts: best manager versus most trophies, and the broader case that the ITFFL regular season is basically a lie.
The honest caveat, because six is a small number
Everything above rests on six seasons of a twelve-team league. That is 72 team-seasons total and six observations for the first-kicker stat. None of this establishes cause. The correct sentence is "the managers who took the first kicker finished, on average, better than the field," not "taking a kicker early makes you good." Nobody should draft a kicker in round 8 because of this article, and if you do, that is on you, and we will absolutely tell this story about you next August.
What the data does support is narrower and more useful: there is no evidence in six seasons of ITFFL drafts that early kicker selection is what separates the good managers from the bad ones. The separation is happening somewhere else. That is where the rest of this series is pointed, starting with the six-year overview of how this league drafts.
The pick'em angle
Here is the funny part for a pick'em crowd. The position we spend all draft season mocking is the one that decides the most games against the number. Kickers do not lose you fantasy weeks. They lose you pick'em weeks, constantly, from 48 yards, on the last play, in games you had cooked.
So the same instinct that makes an early kicker feel insane in a draft is the instinct that makes people underrate kicking when they fill out a slate. If you want to know whether that is costing you, the answer is on the site, not in your memory. Check your own tendencies on the statistics page, then go make this week's picks knowing what you actually do rather than what you think you do.
Draft season is coming. Somebody is going to take a kicker too early again. Based on six years of evidence, the correct response is to laugh, write it down, and then go check whether you are beating him.