International Simulation Football League
*The Mystery of Kulture Fulture - Printable Version

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*The Mystery of Kulture Fulture - infinitempg - 01-13-2020

once again, should this go in statistical analysis? probably. but i don't want it to be buried and in my defense there's a lot of writing here too

[div align=\\\"center\\\"][Image: PSTQtb3.png][/div]

[div align=\\\"center\\\"]The Mystery of Kulture Fulture[/div]
[div align=\\\"center\\\"]A deep dive into how the sim treats kickers[/div]

Kulture Fulture may go down as the greatest kicker in NSFL history - but many critics (including myself, Dean Jackson, and Turk Turkleton) believe this accolade is the result of simple sim luck rather than as a result of high earning. Obviously, it's not fair to knock a player for choosing not to max-earn as a kicker since it only takes 470 TPE to max out the two relevant kicking attributes (Kick Power and Kick Accuracy), but it does pose the question:

[div align=\\\"center\\\"]Why does a semi-active kicker perform so much better than the max earning kickers?[/div]

Kulture Fulture's peak TPE sits at 655 TPE - certainly not a slacker earnings-wise, but it's safely in the semi-active regime. For reference, Turk Turkleton topped off at 1012 TPE, Dean Jackson passed 1200 TPE in his prime, and Micycle McCormick even passed Fulture's TPE mark before switching to QB.

Let's look at the tale of the tape.


Attributes

As mentioned before, it only takes 470 TPE to max out Kick Power and Kick Accuracy. Yet, even with such a low bar, only six kickers in league history ever passed this number: Kulture Fulture (Accuracy), Iyah Blewitt (Accuracy), Micycle McCormick (Balanced), Dean Jackson (Balanced), Christiano Ronaldo (Power), and Turk Turkleton (Power, then switched to Accuracy). This alone puts Fulture in the upper echelon of kickers in the league's history.

Intelligence has long been seen as the third important attribute for kickers, and in the history of the league the only three to max this out are the members of the Kicker Mafia: Turk Turkleton, Dean Jackson, and Micycle McCormick. Kulture Fulture, meanwhile only updated his Intelligence to 80. Did this end up helping him? We will get back to that later.

Awards

Fulture holds the record (by far) for most Kicker and Punter of the Year awards:

[div align=\\\"center\\\"][Image: Awards.jpg?raw=true][/div]

Fulture's 6 Kicker of the Year trophies came back-to-back (to back to back etc), which is impressive in its own right. But it's important to mention his lack of competition in this time period: outside of a highly regressing Dean Jackson, a young Alfredo Crisco, and a young Alex Dasistwirklichseinnachname, Kulture Fulture was the only real kicker of quality during most of this run. Turkleton, who is second on this list, had to deal with a plethora of similar-TPE kickers during his early years before dealing with the rest of the Kicker Mafia in Dean Jackson and Micycle McCormick. Turk also seemed to receive a lot of bad luck with inactives like Stephen Harris snagging three Kicker of the Year awards right under his nose. For punting, Fulture also places second with Turkleton with three trophies behind Dean Jackson's four, with two of them coming after Jackson's retirement.


Statistics

[div align=\\\"center\\\"][Image: HistoricalStats.jpg][/div]

Kulture Fulture is the most accurate field goal kicker in the league's history (min. 50 attempts), with a conversion percentage of 94.372%. This is fairly dominant over the rest of the field, and he's one of only seven players to average over 90% on field goals over a career.

Fulture is also third all time in field goals made with 218, only behind Turkleton (282) and Jackson (227). Fulture will be on a roster next season, and we can expect him to pass Jackson by S20's end - though it is unlikely he will pass Turkleton due to regression getting him before he can hit 12 seasons of play.

Fulture is also fourth all time in total points by a kicker with 1013, behind Turkleton (1481), Forfeit (1101), and Jackson (1094). We can safely assume that with another season or two of play (which he should have in him), Fulture will pass both Forfeit and Jackson to take second place all time in points scored by a kicker.

(As an aside: the craziest part of this league is that the two top scorers in league history are Mike Boss with 1752 points on 292 touchdowns, and Borkus Maximus III with 1506 points on 251 touchdowns. That's way different from the NFL where the points leaders are thoroughly dominated by kickers who play much longer careers than their counterparts.)

Consistency

Kulture Fulture's key selling point to being the GOAT kicker is his remarkable consistency from year to year:

[div align=\\\"center\\\"][Image: Kicks-Season.png?raw=true][/div]

While most kickers wander around 90% throughout their career, Fulture has been (maddeningly) consistent with his field goal percentages, posting only one season below 95% accuracy (S16). Meanwhile another kicker with 100 accuracy, Turk Turkleton, is mired in mediocrity. Turk only managed to post 3 of his 12 seasons over 90% accuracy, and only 2 of those were above 95%.

[div align=\\\"center\\\"][Image: PerfectSeasons.jpg?raw=true][/div]

Fulture has also posted two of the league's perfect field goal seasons, and is one of four members of the elite perfect kicking season club. Only Dean Jackson has posted more perfect field goal seasons with three. The other two 100 accuracy kickers, Turkleton and Blewitt, only appear three times combined on this list and only Blewitt manages to have a perfect overall kicking season.

So we should rephrase our original question:

[div align=\\\"center\\\"]Why does Fulture perform so much better than the other kickers, especially the maxed out ones?[/div]

I don't think I'm going to be able to answer this question, but let's take a deeper dive into the sim and how it treats kickers.

So what matters for kickers, anyways?

Kickers are traditionally told to build their player to maximize Kick Power, Kick Accuracy, and Intelligence*, with Endurance being a secondary attribute to work on after maximizing the others. The sim then weighs these attributes and produces an overall score for the player, similar to how Madden does.

*Note: Intelligence doesn't actually affect the player's overall as per timeconsumer's guide to attributes, but the advice has persisted.

We would expect that the player's overall attribute would then trace nicely to their performance, but we don't necessarily find that to be the case:

[div align=\\\"center\\\"][Image: Kick-OVR-FG%25.png?raw=true][/div]

In what seems to be a cruel twist of fate, field goal percentage actually trends down as overall passes 90. A close look shows that Fulture appears to have found the sweet spot with respect to this turn, while max earners like Jackson and Turkleton have flown too close to the Sun.

Let's break it down to the three main attributes that kickers have traditionally been told to build, looking at the kicking ones first.

[div align=\\\"center\\\"][Image: FG-split-KAc-KDi.png?raw=true][/div]

As the graphs show, both Kick Accuracy and Kick Power are fairly correlated with FG% (for reference, a Spearman's coefficient of 1 would indicate perfect correlation). There does appear to be a larger spread of FG% at the higher power compared to the higher accuracy, though Turkleton is a heavy outlier in FG% at the maximum accuracy.

What is going on with that anyways? Let's look at all the seasons where a kicker had 100 accuracy:

[div align=\\\"center\\\"][Image: 100Accuracy.png?raw=true][/div]

Once again, we see Fulture's consistency outshine both Blewitt and Turkleton. Despite all three having achieved a perfect season, Blewitt and Turkleton have both experienced (very) subpar seasons with their extreme accuracy. I can't find any reasonable explanation to this - they all took similar amounts of long field goals, had similar other attributes, and the offenses they have appear uncorrelated. This is where I have to start concluding that at least some of Fulture's success is based on how much the sim likes him.

How about Intelligence - should kickers even be putting TPE into it? Let's take a look:

[div align=\\\"center\\\"][Image: Kick-INT-FG%25.png?raw=true][/div]

It's incredibly uncorrelated - so take notes new kickers, don't waste TPE on intelligence! You can be dumb as rocks and still do well as a kicker - well actually you can't since both Alex and Kyle Frost were incorrectly made dumb as rocks and failed to do well. But at proper minimum intelligence, you will be fine.

In summary, most things are uncorrelated towards field goal success, and as this chart will show, extra points are their own crapshoot:

[div align=\\\"center\\\"][Image: Kick%20Correlations.jpg?raw=true][/div]

What about punting?

Ah yes, the other side of the coin. Kickers in the NSFL work double duty, and with three Punter of the Year trophies Fulture can say he was a success there too. Let's look at the season-by-season data:

[div align=\\\"center\\\"][Image: Punts-Season.png?raw=true][/div]

Something to note here is that Fulture wasn't exactly a world beater here - he has two fairly good seasons but most of his punting seasons were subpar at best. Part of this can be attributed to his lower kick power attribute, but he's nowhere near as consistent here as he is kicking. Looking at this graph I would even claim either Turkleton or McCormick could take the crown for best punter in league history.

When determining the award winner, voters tend to look at the average punt distance and the number of times the punter lands the ball inside the 20. How do these track to the main kicking attributes?

[div align=\\\"center\\\"][Image: Punt-Avg-KAc-KDi.png?raw=true][/div]

Average punt distance, which I would argue is the more important statistic, correlates well with Kick Power, as we would expect. Kick Accuracy does correlate fairly well, so the sim gets a few points for realism there.

[div align=\\\"center\\\"][Image: Punt-In20-KAc-KDi.png?raw=true][/div]

In terms of pinning the punt, we don't see any correlation whatsoever. I would have expected some measure of accuracy being used to model this statistic, but it seems to be a crapshoot based on field position - in fact the only thing even moderately correlated to this statistic is the number of punts kicked in a season, so I think it's safe to conclude that it's totally random. Should voters discard the realism of awards voting to account for this? I don't know.

Here are all the correlations:

[div align=\\\"center\\\"][Image: PuntCorrelations.jpg?raw=true][/div]

[div align=\\\"center\\\"]In conclusion[/div]

Looking through the data and comparing Fulture's kicking performances to other kickers of similar caliber, I do think it's safe to say that Kulture Fulture is the best kicker in league history. He has simply been more consistent and more accurate than any other kicker - other greats like Turkleton and Jackson struggled with accuracy at times despite having higher attributes across the board. This however doesn't discount the fact that Fulture has been aided both by weak competition for his awards as well as a significant amount of sim luck when compared to the other 100 accuracy kickers. Fulture's punting resume shows that he was at best an average punter, and probably doesn't deserve at least one of his Punter of the Year awards.

How much the sim luck has to do with his success is still to be determined however, and I hope to continue this article in the future with sim test data to see if it's a simple fluke or if there's something hidden in the sim giving him preferential treatment as a kicker.

--

TL;DR:

he's so good x4

Also seriously if Forfeit gets into the Hall of Fame and Micycle doesn't I will riot in the streets - he's been a subpar to average kicker his whole career and only has bulk stats to make up for it. Meanwhile Micycle went perfect 2/5 of his kicking seasons and... you know what that'll be it's own media piece.

--

Github repo with all the data and images (and a lot of extra stuff I'll be using later!) here: https://github.com/infinitempg/kicker-correlations/

*The Mystery of Kulture Fulture - iamslm22 - 01-13-2020

This is great article! Just wanted to say - the NFL points leaders are all kickers because the NFL considers the person going into the end zone as scoring. So Jerry Rice is the non kicker leader not someone like Peyton Manning. Passing TDs don't count.

*The Mystery of Kulture Fulture - infinitempg - 01-13-2020

(01-13-2020, 11:13 AM)iamslm22 Wrote:This is great article! Just wanted to say - the NFL points leaders are all kickers because the NFL considers the person going into the end zone as scoring. So Jerry Rice is the non kicker leader not someone like Peyton Manning. Passing TDs don't count.

.....that makes so much sense

*The Mystery of Kulture Fulture - manicmav36 - 01-13-2020

(01-13-2020, 11:56 AM)infinitempg Wrote:. Meanwhile Micycle went perfect 2/5 of his kicking seasons and... you know what that'll be it's own media piece.

IMO, 5 seasons at a position is not enough to be considered for HOF. You're still 2 seasons away from regression at that point even.

*The Mystery of Kulture Fulture - run_CMC - 01-14-2020

(01-13-2020, 01:25 PM)manicmav36 Wrote:IMO, 5 seasons at a position is not enough to be considered for HOF. You're still 2 seasons away from regression at that point even.
But... his career isn’t 5 excellent years at a position. It’s 5 excellent years at one position followed by several more good years at a different position

*The Mystery of Kulture Fulture - iseedoug - 01-14-2020

This is a top notch article. Thanks for putting in the time for this.

Also, really helpful in thinking about my new character, who I want to be one the great kickers. Although, in some ways this makes me feel like it is out of my control.

I would say a factor that probably plays a role in some way, but I would love to see exactly how much, is the overall offense effectiveness of each team the kicker is on. Some kickers will simply have more or less opportunities to perform based on how much a team gets to the red zone and stall out. There may be a sweet spot in the sim, where if you have too many opportunities, your percent falls some. Kulture Fulture may have had offenses that were in that just right spot to have enough opportunities to kick, but not too many. The sim seems to have weird cutoff things like this. I guess if this hypothesis is true, it may point to endurance mattering some?

anyway, great article.

*The Mystery of Kulture Fulture - infinitempg - 01-14-2020

(01-14-2020, 11:01 AM)iseedoug Wrote:This is a top notch article. Thanks for putting in the time for this.

Also, really helpful in thinking about my new character, who I want to be one the great kickers. Although, in some ways this makes me feel like it is out of my control.

I would say a factor that probably plays a role in some way, but I would love to see exactly how much, is the overall offense effectiveness of each team the kicker is on. Some kickers will simply have more or less opportunities to perform based on how much a team gets to the red zone and stall out. There may be a sweet spot in the sim, where if you have too many opportunities, your percent falls some. Kulture Fulture may have had offenses that were in that just right spot to have enough opportunities to kick, but not too many. The sim seems to have weird cutoff things like this. I guess if this hypothesis is true, it may point to endurance mattering some?

anyway, great article.

I personally didn’t notice any correlation for offenses (I measured via PF but I can also check based on FGA) but I can pump out a few graphs for you later!

Also my advice is to pump up accuracy and power only, and to go for an accurate build! We know the sim somewhat likes that based on Fulture so might as well go for that.

*The Mystery of Kulture Fulture - infinitempg - 01-14-2020

(01-14-2020, 12:46 AM)run_CMC Wrote:But... his career isn’t 5 excellent years at a position. It’s 5 excellent years at one position followed by several more good years at a different position

Good may be a strong word... though most of them weren’t that bad.

As a punter alone though Micycle deserves to be in the Hall

*The Mystery of Kulture Fulture - iseedoug - 01-14-2020

(01-14-2020, 12:58 PM)infinitempg Wrote:I personally didn’t notice any correlation for offenses (I measured via PF but I can also check based on FGA) but I can pump out a few graphs for you later!

Also my advice is to pump up accuracy and power only, and to go for an accurate build! We know the sim somewhat likes that based on Fulture so might as well go for that.

Awesome. It may have no impact. It just always seems weird when we can't explain the sim. But it could all just be random noise.

and Yeah I have been focusing on accuracy, and will continue to do so

*The Mystery of Kulture Fulture - infinitempg - 01-14-2020

(01-14-2020, 12:19 PM)iseedoug Wrote:Awesome. It may have no impact. It just always seems weird when we can't explain the sim. But it could all just be random noise.

and Yeah I have been focusing on accuracy, and will continue to do so

nada

[Image: Kick-FGA-FG%25.png?raw=true]

[Image: Kick-PF-FG%25.png?raw=true]

Endurance does seem to play a role but maybe that's because the kickers who max Endurance already maxed out their other stats

[Image: Kick-END-FG%25.png?raw=true]