Last season, Vanderjagt was easily the favorite kicker to be selected first and almost inexplicably he ended up as a major disappointment. Throw Jeff Wilkins in the same boat and you can see why squandering a pick on the first kicker so rarely matters.

At least we saw a total of seven kickers taken in the first dozen remain in that top starting group for the season. Other than Olindo Mare, the third to the tenth kicker panned out about as well as was expected.

The top dozen started out with two duds and then ended with two relative duds in Todd Peterson and Matt Stover. The rest of the kickers taken are inconsequential to analysis really since most of them were selected on the basis of their bye week for filling in when the starter was gone. After the first dozen are taken, there is little rhyme or reason to how they fall.

Jay Feely and John Carney were the nicest surprises for kickers, though Feely was aided in large part by his five field goal, three extra point game in week sixteen. If you still were playing that late in the season, you were very richly rewarded for having Feely and that will play in the minds of drafters this season as well.

The top dozen kickers were almost all taken in the first 13 kickers drafted, exception to only Mike Hollis and the Bills high scoring offense last season.

This shows a nice amount of predictability to kickers when so many of them lived up to expectations and the reality is that only about a point and a half overall separated the best starting kicker from the 12th berst kicker. Not a lot of crowing when your advantage is only one point per game. At least for being afterthoughts in the draft, kickers came through better than any other position. But does that always happen? Let's look at the last three drafts and remember - there is not a huge amount of difference in the top 20 anyway.

While 2002 looked like the average drafter knew their kickers, that was more of an abberation than a rule. In 2001, only half of the first twelve kickers ended up scoring that way and in 2000, the same rule of six applied. Mike Vanderjagt has been the default first drafted kicker for the past three years and it makes sense that last season when kickers were most predictable, he turns in his worst season.

In the end, the main caveat to take from this is that kickers are not as predictable as they seemed in 2002 and with the marginal decrease from player to player, it makes no sense to take a highly ranked one. Look for a return this season of the 50% rule and when you select your second kicker, do it for more than merely covering a bye week.