New Kicking Metric Shows Just How Valuable NFL's Best Kickers Were This Season

The NFL has advanced stats and metrics to help determine the value of players beyond what appears on the stat sheet. Kickers, however, have often been excluded from those metrics, which focus more on quarterbacks and other skill positions as opposed to special teams.

Well, the folks over at FanSided have developed a new metric to determine the value of kickers, which they released on Tuesday. KVA, or Kick Value Added, aims to accurately analyze kicking performance by taking into account the league average success rate on kicks from similar distances.

FanSided’s Adam Fromal explained the metric as such:

“Instead of treating all makes and misses equally, KVA measures how much value a kicker actually adds (or costs) relative to league expectations from the same distances across the field. A long-distance conversion shouldn’t be weighed the same as a chip shot, and a miss doesn’t carry the same meaning everywhere on the field. As we saw during a 2025 season that featured incredible long-range success, making a 55-yarder this year shouldn't be treated the same as a kicker drilling a 55-yarder in 1985. KVA captures that difference.”

The team at FanSided used this newly introduced metric to evaluate the performance of every NFL kicker throughout the 2025 season, and the results were an intriguing look into what kickers added the most value to their teams, as well as those that didn’t.

For KVA, a score of 0.0 is meant to be the average mark. A positive score indicates added value, while a negative one denotes lost value. Let’s take a look at the top five and bottom five scores, according to KVA.

The top five kickers in the NFL in 2025, according to FanSided’s KVA metric, were Chargers’ Cameron Dicker (9.0215), 49ers’ Eddy Pineiro (10.4383), Jets kicker Nick Folk (11.7096), Will Reichard of the Vikings (13.5633) and, topping the list, Texans’ Ka’imi Fairbairn (15.4259).

Fairbairn was considered the NFL’s best kicker this season according to KVA. He missed a total of just four kicks this season, including two field goals from more than 50 yards out, one extra point and a deep kick that was blocked by the Chiefs.

On the opposite end, no one was rated worse by KVA than Packers kicker Brandon McManus.

Placing in the bottom five were Packers’ Brandon McManus (-11.4029), Rams’ Joshua Karty (-11.0817), Saints and Colts kicker Blake Grupe (-6.099), Patriots’ Andres Borregales (-5.9009) and Giants veteran kicker Younghoe Koo (-5.6278).

There were some kickers many might’ve expected to crack the top five, namely Cowboys’ Brandon Aubrey and Jaguars’ Cam Little, that didn’t quite make the cut. Aubrey ranked ninth with a KVA of 6.6509 while Little was 10th with a KVA of 5.7737. Aubrey’s lackluster end of the season took him out of the running for the top five after he missed four of his last 10 field goal attempts, bringing him to six field goal misses and one missed extra point on the year. As for Little, who broke the NFL record for the longest made field goal, his average kick distance was below 40 yards and he had two misses from within 50 yards. Those misses (five in total on the season) drove his score down and placed him in 10th.

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