What is valuable to Kickers in DDSPF21?
A medium dive into what attributes are worth investing in
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With the new simulation slowly getting air under its wings, I thought it would be as good a time as any to see what improvements, if any, our friends at Wolverine Studios have made to the logic and code used for kickers and punters in the game - as well as taking a peek at how the wonderful Sim Transfer Team tried to work with it. This was definitely an interesting project as it got me back in the weeds of some test simming for DDSPF21, allowed me to play with the updater magic sheet, and I got to use a fancy new matplotlib style for my graphs!
Out with the old, in with the new
True league boomers will remember the olden days, when there were only three active and max earning kickers who somehow lost Kicker of the Year and Punter of the Year awards to inactive 200 TPE players on a regular basis, before having to bow at the altar of semi-active and greatest of all time Kulture Fulture. There were three archetypes - accurate, power, and balanced - and you only really needed 470 TPE to reach maximum kicking stats. You could put TPE in silly things like speed, tackling, blocking, passing, and endurance, but they didn't mean anything. And even then, you did not have to maximize your kicking stats to be any good at kicking. Stephen Harris, second all time in Kicker of the Year awards with three, never passed 87 Kick Power and 90 Kick Accuracy. Iyah Blewitt, who had possibly the greatest kicking season of all time in S9, never reached 600 TPE (though he had maximum Kick Power at 90 and maximum Kick Accuracy at 100).
This complete lack of incentive to earn TPE as a kicker plus the fact that teams could just ride 400 TPE inactive players for 10 seasons meant that there was an extremely low supply of kickers. Of the three active and max earning kickers in the early days, only two would actually finish their careers as kickers (Dean Jackson and Turk Turkleton) and be rightfully inducted to the Hall of Fame. It was conditions like these that led to legends like Kulture Fulture to ride the sim luck and desert of league kickers to six Kicker of the Year awards and three Punter of the Year awards.
The S12 recreate class as well as the S15 and S18 /r/NFL classes came at a good time for the league, whose teams had just began to run out of their old IA kickers. Inactive, sub-300 TPE players like Neo Donaldson (maxed out at 257 TPE), Baxter Frost (frost sux lmap, also he only had 216 TPE before retiring), and Kicky Bobby (128 TPE!) were able to win Punter of the Year awards, though gems Alex Dasistwirklichseinnachname and Alfredo Crisco put in the work and got three Kicker of the Year and three Punter of the Year awards between the two of them. Only until recently have there been high profile and max earning recreates at the kicker position, which has allowed for a diversity in award winners.
Enter the sim change. This was the chance the league finally had to freely adjust the kicking archetypes, to make earning TPE mean something. There were three major changes that the team made in an attempt to make Kicker an interesting position to play:
1. Removing the Balanced archetype
Sometimes you want the best of both worlds. The Balanced arch was able to max out at 95 Kick Power and 95 Kick Accuracy, meaning you could have power and accuracy. However, it turned out this wasn't such a great thing, as the balanced arch seemed to miss out on the elite leg strength of 100 Kick Power and the pinpoint accuracy of 100 Kick Accuracy. Removing this arch means updaters have one less arch to worry about, new users have one less choice to pick from (that would only hurt them), and would lead to point 2...
2. Changing the update scale
Now this change was universal and shouldn't be applied only to kickers, but it's still important to look at through this lens. By adjusting the update scale at 95+ attributes to 25 TPE per point, the price to reach 100 in any attribute became 50 TPE more expensive. For an archetype that used to only require 470 TPE to reach maximum skill, this was an increase in over 10% earning. "But infinite," you might be saying, "520 TPE isn't exactly a lot of TPE to earn to be maxed out!" And you'd be right. That's where the third major change comes in...
3. Letting Kickers reach 100/100, for a hefty price
With DDSPF21 came the idea of purchasing player traits, little aspects of a player that meant they performed a little different in the sim. For most positions, this was a checkbox in-game that would give them more athleticism, or make them more likely to evade a tackler, but this proved to not be viable for kickers. The idea that replaced this was, in my opinion, much better - letting kickers reach that magical plateau of 100 Kick Power and 100 Kick Accuracy. Now, this would not be easy. To unlock the 90-95 range in your archetype-opposite attribute, you need to shell over 150 TPE. Once you hit 95 in the attribute, it takes another 200 TPE to unlock the last 5 points. Add on the fact that these points cost 25 TPE, and you're looking at 1070 TPE to fully max out a kicker. Now this is much more reasonable for an elite player. But is it WORTH IT?
Let's find out.
Methods to the madness
With a perfectly legal copy of DDSPF21, I got to work. Thanks to the Update team, I was able to get access to the player updating tool (updated to Week 9), which I modified to adjust each kicker in the league to exactly the attributes I wanted. Thanks to the sim team, I was able to get my hands on the pre-sim Week 1 S27 file. These were the tools I went to work with.
I started by setting 10 specific sets of attributes I wanted to work with. Since kickers in the new sim can only adjust Kick Accuracy, Kick Power, and Intelligence, I decided to test the maximum of each archetype, maximum with 1 trait, and maximum with 2 traits, each with maximum Intelligence (90 INT) and minimum Intelligence (60 INT). This meant setups of 100KP/100KA, 100KP/95KA, 100KP/90KA, 95KP/100KA, and 90KP/100KA with each INT setup. Each kicker on a team was adjusted to these attributes, though their season was not changed (so that the skill levels will be different in the sim). I then did five season sims without fixing the morale because I was too lazy and it was an incredible waste of my time because I wanted to study what effects, if any, morale would have on kickers. The schedule is the same as our true S27 schedule, and I did not simulate the playoffs so that each kicker would have an equal number of games.
Broad Strokes
Let's take a look at the broad data before we really dig into looking for correlations. Just so everyone sees it, here are the broad stats for each set of attributes:
These tables are color-coded so that red numbers are the largest and blue numbers are the least. While most of these numbers are relatively even, I do want to quickly point your attention to the 50+ yard field goal attempts - having 100 Kick Power seemed to lead to an average of 100 more attempts from distance over 5 seasons. We will revisit that later!
Extra Points
Sorting our table by extra point percentage, this is what we see:
Pretty much every file is identical, totally unsurprising. We expect our kickers to convert these if they're professionals. Let's move on.
Field Goals
Now we're going to start seeing interesting things. Here is the table, sorted by field goal percentage:
The top 4 slots, somewhat ahead of the rest of the pack, all go to 100 Kick Accuracy kickers. They also all have activated and fulfilled at least 1 trait. Also of note, while it's close, the last 4 slots all go to non-traited kickers.
How does this split by distance kicked?
Okay, so first of all, no one missed a field goal from under 20 yards in 50 seasons, so pat on the back guys! Field goals from 20-29 yards seemed to be consistently converted as well, and from 30-39 yards we see a wider range of conversion percentages (92% to 97%). At 40-49 yards we see a range between 74% to 81% conversion, before the wheels fall off the wagon at 50+ yards.
There's a lot of data to parse through here, so let's compare each set of attributes to the mean performance across the files:
First of all, teehee the lines glow. Second, it appears the attributes that tend to stay over the mean all have at least 1 trait (100KP/100KA, 100KP/95KA, 95KA/100KP). The six corresponding lines for those are all above the mean at field goal distances of 49 yards and under (we will ignore 50+ yards for now since there's not a ton of kicks from there and the sim already makes them a crapshoot). The four lines consistently below the mean are all lacking any traits, and they deviate by 2% off the mean from 30-49 yards. It's also interesting to note that from 30-39 yards, the 100KP/100KA are significantly better than the rest of the crowd, over 2% better than kickers with 1 trait and reaching 4-5% better than those with no traits.
Let's try to isolate the attributes by themselves. Here is Kick Power:
We can see here that at each Intelligence level, Kick Power appears to have a positive effect on overall accuracy. The 100KP/100KA kickers seem to have a distinct advantage from 30-39 yards, though both 100KP/100KA and 95KP/100KA are better off from 40-49 yards. While power in general should not limit accuracy of a kick, if a kicker is straining to kick at their maximum range, their accuracy is going to wobble. I'm not sure we are seeing that here, but we do see that the 90KP kickers do significantly worse.
How does Kick Accuracy play into this?
Well, it's what we expect to see, though not as drastic as we might like. Higher Kick Accuracy leads to more kicks being made, across intelligence levels. There isn't much of a gap here though, so we'll have to do further digging on this later.
Lastly, what difference does Intelligence make? To study this, let's compare the difference in field goal percentage from 90 INT to 60 INT:
This makes no sense. There seems to be a net negative effect from higher intelligence from 30-39 yards (though small, around 1%), and a net positive from 40-49. Finally, it seems across the board that intelligence helps with 50+ yarders, unless you're at 100/100. What???
Punts
Let's transition to punting statistics, where we can avoid some graphs for a bit! First, let us look at punting averages:
Kick Power is absolutely king here. This table is sorted by Punt Average, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it was sorted by power. Ultimately, this makes sense!
As I mentioned in my latest Surrender Punts article, DDSPF21 seems to have vastly improved the punting mechanics to allow for coffin corners! As a result, we see a large increase in punts landing inside the 20:
For context, the very best punters in DDSPF16 could barely crack 26% of their punts landing inside the 20. These records are going to be (and already are being) absolutely shattered. Anyways, it appears that Kick Accuracy plays an important enough role here that the 90KA kickers are left in the dust. We will have to do more digging here.
Finally, does intelligence play a role in either of these stats?
Having higher intelligence does seem to have a net positive effect, but not a lot. 0.5 yards per punt isn't a ton in the grand scheme of things, and a change in 1% of punts landing in the 20 isn't huge either. I think we can safely claim intelligence is a wash here as well.
Correlations and Math!
Alright, let's dig a little deeper into this data. As I mentioned at the beginning, I ran 5 separate simulations for each set of attributes, so now I will group each simulation by attribute and file to produce 50 different seasons to look at.
This might be a good primer for those who are unfamiliar with Spearman correlations:
Morale
First, let's check to see if I made the right decision by ignoring Morale.
The colors are now scaled from a Spearman Correlation Coefficient of 1 to -1, where the further from 0 it is, the more correlated (or anti-correlated) the variables. Here, we see that there is essentially no correlation between morale and kicker performance. This means I was (a) totally justified in saving time and (b) kickers really do have their patented bad memory in this game! So, good news for kickers, your performance is not going to be drastically affected by your team.
As a side note, I went and looked at this for all positions, and the only position I saw a decent correlation between Morale and performance was in running backs.
Position Skill
Players in the sim have a positional skill rating calculated from their experience (seasons since draft) and their TPE levels. As mentioned previously, the experience was unchanged and so the skills within each file vary, giving more variety than the other attributes we'll look at.
Here are the correlations for Kicker skill:
We see here at best a very weak correlation between position skill and kicking performance. I'm not sure if this is due to all of the kickers having relatively high kicking skill already or not.
Here are the correlations for Punter skill:
These are slightly better correlated, but it's still a very weak correlation. Again, most of these players already have a high punter skill, and so if I wanted to get a better look at this I would need to expand my study to lower TPE levels.
Kick Accuracy
Let's see some more interesting things. Here are the correlations for Kick Accuracy:
Now we're cooking with fire! But let's be careful here, because this data is misleading! Here is an example of what I mean:
You can see here that the color of the data points are modified by the Kick Power of that season - we see that while the correlation coefficient is significant at -0.537, it's not a true correlation! The big downslope here at 100 Kick Accuracy is caused by the fact that we have different Kick Powers. I did not test for 95KP/95KA or 90KP/90KA, and so we have an artificial skewing of our data.
In order to get a more accurate view of the relationship between Kick Accuracy and performance, we need to hold Kick Power still at 100:
These numbers are more accurate - and we see quite a few moderate and strong correlations! Let's start with field goal percentage as a whole:
It's hard to see here, but there is definitely a slight upward trend in FG Pct as Kick Accuracy increases. Thinking back to the graphs from before, there were significant differences at different distances. How does that turn out here?
You may need to click on this image to see it full-sized.
The first outcome to note is that from 20-29 yards, every single kick was made for 100KA kickers. The correlation is mysteriously most definitive for 30-39 yards, before becoming somewhat weaker for 40+ yards. Why there is such importance placed on the 30-39 yard field goal range is beyond me, to be honest. These are all at 100 Kick Power, so there shouldn't be any issue with straining to reach these kicks.
Circling back to Punt Averages:
Now that we only account for 100 Kick Power seasons, there really is no correlation between this and Kick Accuracy! This makes complete sense, since accuracy shouldn't play a huge role in how far you can boot the ball anyways.
Accuracy should play a major role in pinning a punt though:
There's a pretty moderate correlation here, as expected. A more accurate kicker should be better at placing the ball where they want it - though if we are being completely realistic here, the game should account for a punting accuracy and a kicking accuracy, since those are different skills.
Kick Power
Here is our list of correlations, remembering the lessons learned from last section and holding Kick Accuracy at 100:
The one that sticks out like a sore thumb is Punt Average, though we see some other moderate to somewhat strong correlations with field goals:
You may need to click on this image to see it full-sized.
This data is slightly similar to the data for Kick Accuracy, but the correlation is weaker for 30-39 yards and stronger for all others. Once again, we see that at 50+ yards, the sim basically is a crapshoot.
There is one thing we can accurately predict for 50+ yard field goals - how many times a team will attempt it:
There is a strong correlation between Kick Power and the amount of times a team will let a kicker attempt a 50+ yard field goal. This fundamentally makes sense, as a stronger kicker should be more likely to make a long kick. However, we have seen from the previous graph that even a 100 KA kicker is barely more likely to make a kick at 100 KP as it is at 90 KP. So while the real-world logic of attempting these kicks checks out, the sim does not seem to be on the same page.
Finally, the home run for power kickers - Punt Average:
These two values are incredibly well correlated. If you want to average longer kicks, you have to go for a power build. While 2-3 yards doesn't seem like much in the grand scheme of things, Punt Average is a key statistic cited when voting is done for awards. This tells me that power kickers are going to have a strong advantage here, though the better logic of coffin corners may give accuracy kickers a bump up from before.
Intelligence
Intelligence has been a total bust for us so far. Does the data back us up?
Short answer, yes. Longer answer, yesssssss. Pretty much everything is at best weakly correlated to intelligence, and not necessarily in good ways. Like we saw before, higher Intelligence appears to be a slight detriment at the 30-39 distance, which makes no sense. There does appear to be a very slight positive correlation between Intelligence and Punts Inside the 20 and Punt Average, as well as a slight negative correlation to extra point percentage for some reason. The sim also feels moderately more comfortable kicking a very short field goal? Nothing really makes sense with intelligence for kickers.
Conclusions
The main conclusion here is that, if you are a kicker, you will definitely want to max earn and purchase both traits if possible. Maxing out both Kick Power and Kick Accuracy requires a total amount of 1070 TPE, which means you'll have at least 2-3 seasons of 100/100 kicking if you max earn. Even getting one trait and being at 100/95 is a worthwhile investment - and this requires only 745 TPE.
Kick Accuracy does the predictable stuff - aiding in converting field goals into points - but thanks to the improved punting mechanics and coffin corners allows for more punts to be pinned inside the 20. Kick Power plays a significant role in both punting average as well as how confident your team is to trot you out for a long field goal. Intelligence does not seem like it is a worthwhile investment of TPE from these tests, as there is only very slight reason to believe that it plays an impact on anything. When regressing, it should be the first attribute on the chopping block. The only thing that I can definitely confirm about intelligence is that it improves your player's overall in the game.
If I were a young kicker, I'd definitely start off with the Accurate archetype over the Power archetype, just because I think it's more valuable to have the better field goal accuracy and the better coffin corners over the 50+ yard field goals (which are basically a crapshoot) and longer punts.
TL;DR: WOO GONE ARE THE DAYS OF LOW TPE KICKERS BEING GOOD (hopefully)