From the start of the season, I said I wanted to take a look at how hard it is to actually kick a field goal —not from a go out and kick one myself point of view— for professional kickers, by looking at the publicly available data from the NFL. For a stats nerd such as myself, it’s an interesting problem and one that I didn’t know at the outset that I could solve. But armed with R-studio, a couple laptops, and plenty of coffee, a grad school classmate and I set out to see if we could predict a kick.
Kicking NFL field goals looks hard. Correctly predicting them is even harder.
